Black Diamond (23 page)

‘And now I’m here,’ Alma said.

‘All grown up.’

‘We’ll settle down with it. We like each other already, so it’ll be all right.’

‘What if you hadn’t liked me?’

‘I don’t know,’ Alma said. ‘I think I’d just have moved on in a couple of weeks.’

‘It frightens me to think of it.’

‘I bet it happens. There must be a lot of kids who get a summer job someplace, to look at their parents, and that’s all they want to do, whether they like them or not: they just take that one look and go away. That’s what Bruce should do.’

‘Tell me some more about him.’

‘I wouldn’t know where to begin. I hope you’ll meet him, too, some day. Then you can see for yourself.’

‘It’s hard to describe people.’

‘It gets harder, the closer you are to them.’

‘I’ve got some pictures from my highschool days. Everything’s in a box. I haven’t opened it since the adoption. I used to think about throwing it all away, but I never did. There’s a photograph of Jim. Do you know something: when we were at school, he was a very good athlete but what he was really wonderful at was – he was the most beautiful dancer you ever saw. I guess that’s something you inherited from him.’

Alma thought about a teenage boy, a marvelous dancer and younger than she was now. He was no longer anonymous. Something that was hers had once belonged to him, too. There was a way in which he and she were the same. Now that she knew, she couldn’t forget it. She saw a time coming when curiosity would draw her to the place where he lived, not to meet him but just to catch sight of him for an instant.

At the moment, she didn’t want to. From having no relatives, she’d gone to having too many. They were beginning to confuse her. She needed to sit down for a long talk with Bruce.

* * *

Joanna telephoned him early in the morning. The call came through on his second phone. He’d decided only the day before that he’d give her a ring himself that afternoon.

She said that she was afraid he’d been right about those laurel bushes, and most of the other things in the garden as well: could
he come over tomorrow afternoon and talk about it? The girls would both be away on the school glee club weekend. And her husband was going to be looking over somebody’s horses all day long. ‘So, we’ll have plenty of time to talk,’ she told him. ‘About the garden.’ Her voice sounded low and purring, as if she’d be smiling. He said: Sure, he’d see her around two-thirty.

That night he went to a movie theater and sat through a double feature. One film was a low-budget light comedy about
insurance
fraud investigators; it starred a TV actress he liked. The second told the story of a city cop who tried to buck the system, was thrown out of the force and ended up saving the whole of New York single-handed, after shooting thirty-six people.

When he got home he wasn’t sleepy. He took a walk.

Back in his highschool years he used to enjoy walking around alone at night in the late spring and early summer; he’d be feeling restless and he’d start out fairly fast, but as the light went he’d calm down until he was moving lazily from street to street, the trees around him growing massive and shaggy with darkness. He used to love walking all through the night. That was another town of white picket fences and neat lawns. At one time he’d detested everything about it. Now he thought of it with the longing of homesickness, and of his youth and childhood that were over forever.

He walked for hours. He tried not to think ahead, not to plan; just to walk from one shadow to the next.

*

He got the afternoon off by doing a deal with a man at work. He’d arranged it the day before, so he had nothing hanging over him. Everything was going smoothly.

He took his time getting to the house, parked, and sat in the car for a while. The trees were only just beginning to turn. The blue sky had a few bright, puffy clouds in it; the air was mild and stirred by the constant movement of small breezes. He wanted to relax into the beauty of what he was looking at, but instead of giving him rest, the loveliness of the day excited him. Everything he looked at seemed invested with immense significance. He wondered if the strange heightening of emotion – apparent in the
world outside as well as within him – meant that he was going to end up killing her.

When he tried to think ahead, it was as if he’d gone blind: as if his mind had entered a kind of night. Things distant and near were equally incomprehensible to him, as were the past and the future, the home that was gone and the one that had never been. He thought that he might have come to the end of his life. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He seemed to have forgotten his way.

He knew that the solution to everything would come to him at the right moment, but he ought to have had a plan. What he’d imagined at the beginning was that he’d start with the two daughters. But they’d been too experienced to be damaged, too shallow to be hurt. All he’d done was to prove that they were worthless, and he’d already known that. They had cheated him of his revenge. They were fighting and full of spite against each other, but that wasn’t enough. He had to do something to Joanna herself. Maybe he could cause a break between her and her husband. Or – more than that; he might be able to persuade her to run away with him. That would be best of all.

This was the day for it: the culmination. Everything was going to work. Maybe he still didn’t know how, but that wasn’t important.

He got out of the car and walked down the street to the house. She opened the door before he had a chance to ring the bell. She had a glass in her hand. She smiled as if posing for a photograph, and said, ‘Hi. Come on in. Have a drink.’

‘Fine,’ he said.

She swished away in front of him, across the hall, down two steps, over the living-room rug and to the screened-in porch that looked out on to the garden.

The sliding glass doors were closed; no one would be able to hear them from across the lawn. And the slatted bamboo blinds were drawn on two sides: without a good pair of field glasses, nobody could see them, either. She’d set everything up. All he had to do was to let her fall into it.

She was wearing a silky, wrap-around dress that had appeared
to be flowing like water while she walked. Now that she was stretched out on one of the sofas, the material pulled tight so that he could see the lines of a tiny pair of bikini pants underneath and, above the belt at her waist, the shape of her breasts and nipples almost as exactly as if she’d been naked.

‘What can I offer you?’ she said, in the same voice she’d used over the telephone.

Right,
he thought.
I’ll
make
you
work
for
it.
‘How about a gin and tonic to start with?’

She got up, mixed him a drink, bent over his chair to hand it to him, dumped some more bourbon into her own glass and repositioned herself on the sofa. She’d made sure that he’d been able to see down her dress. This wasn’t going to be the day to examine the shrubs for mildew and leaf rot.

She said, ‘Why don’t you bring that erection over here and let it say hello?’

‘I might,’ he said. He lifted his glass and swirled the ice cubes around. ‘Why don’t you tell me something about yourself first?’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh, your unspoiled girlhood, how you ended up with a man who’s got a jail record – that kind of thing.’

‘How do you know about that?’

‘If you work on a paper, you’ve got access to a lot of information. I was curious about you.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not?’

‘My two girls are both crazy about you.’

‘Oh?’

‘I guess you think you know a lot about girls.’

‘Uh-huh. And you know about men. So that makes us even.’

She moved her leg. Her dress fell open at the side, showing her thigh nearly up to the hipbone.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ he said. ‘Where did you grow up?’

‘In a small town. Full of small people with small minds.’ She drained her glass and banged it down on the table next to her.

‘A lot of them live in big towns too, and in the suburbs.’

‘But you can get away from them easier there. This town I grew up in – if you were seen talking with somebody on the way home from school, five people would have mentioned it to your mother before you got in the door. That’s how I met Ray. He was working on the road. I was on my way to the bus stop. Nobody else used to walk that route; all the girls in my grade were like their mothers – they’d disassociated themselves from me because I’d been out with a boy in the senior class who had a bad reputation. They were all saying I’d been sleeping with him, which I had, of course. You bet your boots. And didn’t they wish they had, too. He was the real McCoy, all right. He had what it takes.’ She reached for her glass, tried to drink from it and realized that it was empty.

Bruce stood up and took the glass from her. He poured her a drink of water with a fistful of ice cubes in it. As he put some more tonic into his own glass, he said, ‘Go on.’

‘Sure. I thought he was pretty cute. He’s gotten a little beefy now, but you should have seen him when he was twenty-five – Jesus. A little like you, matter of fact, but darker. It was early spring. We had a freak heat-wave. He’d be there with his shirt off and they’d call things out to me – not the usual dirty stuff: jokes, to make me laugh. It was mainly him. I got to doing it back, just for fun.’

He gave her the drink of water, pulled his chair nearer and sat down again. He didn’t want to get too drunk to see the right moment when it came. He wanted the news of who he was to be devastating. She was pretending to be drunker than she was; she’d be able to take it in when he told her. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Then one day he waited around the corner for me. Asked me out. So I said yes, and from then on we were just screwing each other to death. You can’t imagine what he was like. Me, too. I needed it all the time. When you’re that age, it’s like being insane. All the time.’

‘And then?’

‘They found out about it, of course. Big scenes. Lower-class thug and how could I demean myself and so on: I was doing it to shock, I didn’t really have any interest in him, so on, so forth,
trying to make him look bad. I thought I was supposed to have a whiskey here. What is this – gin?’

‘It’s a light whiskey.’

‘Brucie, this is so light, it could pass for white in Alabama. Put something in it.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I thought I was so smart. We both did. You know how the legal age for marriage varies from state to state? In Arkansas it’s something like fourteen for the girl and sixteen for the boy, but if you’ve got your parents’ consent, it’s about twelve and fourteen. South Carolina, too. I think so.’

‘That was supposed to be the Church’s answer to the
illegitimacy
rate: if you let them get married young, at least all the children would be legal.’

‘I thought if I got pregnant, they couldn’t object. I got a copy of my birth certificate and just waited. Where’s that drink?’

‘Him?’ he said, suddenly understanding. ‘It was the same guy you’re married to?’

‘What about that drink, bartender?’

He took her glass, poured out more water and handed it to her. As he sat back down in the chair, his hand brushed against her bare leg.

‘So what happened?’

‘Pretty dumb. I’d underestimated how much they hated me. Some parents do. They’re forced to have kids because of the social conventions – it’s something they need, like a car or a house, to show they’ve made it. But they don’t want them. Maybe I was doing it back, too. Anyway, I waited for it to show, and then they laid it on the line: I was no better than a whore, my moral behavior reflected on them, but I was underage and they were in charge of me and if I didn’t agree to have the baby adopted, they’d call the police and have Ray arrested for statutory rape. That’s what they can do to a man who screws around with a girl who’s –’

‘Under eighteen, I know. You should have gotten to the next state before you broke the law.’

‘Oh, what I should have done. They’d have caught us under
the Mann Act, or something else. You can’t win against people like that. They’d locked me in my room. I wanted that baby so bad. I couldn’t believe they’d be able to do it to me. I figured, if I could just get away, get to Ray, I could give birth by myself and it would be okay. I looked old enough, so we could pass for man and wife. I –’ She sat up, with her hands to her cheeks.

‘Yes?’ he said. He thought she was going to choke, but she started to cry, and to scream, and to shout the rest of her story.

‘Those bastards,’ she shrieked. ‘Doing that to their own child. Took me in to that adoption place and I fought all the way. Told me how many years he could get behind bars if I didn’t cooperate. Till finally, I gave in. I thought – well, we could get married in two and a half years – in a lot of states. And then we could sue, get the baby back, and it would be better than him going to jail. The other girls sitting there in the waiting room – my God. I can still remember them: Cheryl and Pat. Cheryl was engaged to a boy who was just making his way up the office ladder; they were supposed to have their wedding the next April. But his parents and her parents decided that a baby just then would come at the wrong time for everybody. And Pat – she’d had one boyfriend who’d run out on her and another one that said he’d marry her if she got rid of the baby the first one left her with. I really wonder how that place could have pretended it was helping people. I know what they were doing: they were selling merchandise. They got me into their operating theater and I fought. Everybody was screaming, including me. All those papers they have on their walls, to say how they’ll heal the sick and be as good as Jesus Christ – you should have seen the whole gang of them on top of me, sticking their needles into me like I was a pin cushion. When I woke up, it was all over. The baby was gone. They were nice enough to tell me it was a boy; that was the only decent thing they did: imagine going through all that, and never even knowing? Anyway, I was too weak to put up much resistance afterwards. I kept passing out and crying. My parents got the doctors to tell me that if I didn’t pull myself together, I’d be in the hands of the psychiatrists for the rest of my life. I could even be committed. You know, if you’ve got the money, you can
buy a doctor like anything else. That’s what they were afraid of, see – that Ray was after their money. My mother kept saying, “You’re doing it on purpose, I know you are.” I guess she was scared people would find out how they’d treated me. I was on the edge of going crazy: I could feel it right next to me. And I was scared, too. But I finally reached a point where I could think. It was like being one step away, and if you got too near, you’d be standing in the shadow. I knew that if I could get my health back, and just keep living, in a couple of years I’d be in the clear: I’d be with Ray, and we’d get the baby back, and we’d have a lot of others, too. It was a good thing I didn’t find out till later what they’d really done. They’d had him arrested, of course. He was there in jail, all the time, paying his debt to society. Nice, huh?’