Death Kit (38 page)

Diddy extremely sad. Not angry any more. Sad that Hester should fear him. As if he were someone risen from the dead, to be honored at a distance for his extraordinary feat; not loved at close range. But her instinct may be sound. If indeed he is a posthumous creature whose very touch was withering.

A final flaring-up of resistance to Hester's verdict, even as she is visibly softening toward him. “But goddamn it,” Diddy cried, “you can't be right all the time!”

“Why not?” said Hester.

“Why not?” Diddy repeated incredulously.

“What do you think, Dalton? That being right is something democratic? A guarantee that you can be right half the time and I can be right the other half? Darling, it isn't like that—except when it is. And with us, it isn't.”

Diddy turning restlessly in the bed, not knowing what to answer.

“You were about to tell me something,” Hester continued. “You were saying you thought I was at least partly right in what I said. What's right?”

“Maybe … that I am a kind of Lazarus. I feel like one. Especially since I tried … to kill myself.”

“And what's wrong in what I said?” Hester was unbuttoning her blouse.

Diddy grimaces; reaches out to put his hand on her breast. “What's wrong, at least what I pray will turn out to be wrong, is that living with Lazarus is dangerous for you.”

“But you know, Dalton,” she said, slipping under the covers, “I was saying just as strongly that I'm dangerous for you. If you're Lazarus, maybe I'm Medusa with the snaky hair turning you to stone.”

Diddy had forgotten about the stone. Wait, think a moment. But his body feels as different from a stone (now) as a swallow is from a hammer. Should he trust what his body exuberantly urges? Or should he heed the garish premonitions that swell inside his mind? No choice. The choice is already made. Diddy clasped the girl in his arms. “Take the damn skirt off,” he murmurs. “Why have you worn your skirt into bed?”

“Have we stopped quarreling?” she asks.

“Hell, I don't know. I can't think any more. My mind's a blank.” Diddy waited for Hester to say something. But at least she was pulling off the rest of her clothing and throwing it on the floor. “You don't want to fight any more, do you?”

“No. I'm worn out.”

“But you must promise me that tomorrow we'll talk about Paul.”

“Why?”

“Because it's important to me. Even more important now. This whole nightmare tonight started, remember, because I said I didn't trust Paul. And you took that to mean something about me, not about my brother. Now, all the more, I insist that you meet him and see for yourself what he's like.”

Diddy confident he would be vindicated, at least on this particular issue. If, to Hester's ears, he sounded spiteful and unloving, she could have no inkling of Paul's shallowness, his flair for exploiting those who loved him, his vanity, his self-deceptions. But she should be able to guess how much, once, Diddy had loved Paul.

“You must meet him this time,” Diddy repeated. “Then you can judge for yourself.” That seems a good idea. But perhaps not. Why is Diddy so confident Hester will see through Paul? See the whole Paul. She might see just part of what Diddy sees. The graceful Paul who can, when he chooses, make anyone smile; can make it easier for anyone to like himself a little more. Maybe she'll find him attractive. More attractive than Diddy. “Tomorrow…”

“Dalton, please don't talk about tomorrow. Where are you? I want you closer to me.”

“He said he'd call us tomorrow. I don't know for how long he's in town this time, but I want to know if you'll meet him.”

Hester thrust her body against Diddy's in the way that always arouses him. The shuddering, almost painful knotting of his groin, the hard flowering of his sex. Hester has slipped farther down under the covers; is taking his sex in her mouth. Diddy groans, throws back the blanket, presses on the back of her head with his hand. She's devouring him, taking him inside her, pulling him toward her. Dragging him away from thinking, from memory, from words, from Paul. Let all that go, then. It doesn't matter. No, it does. But can wait until tomorrow.

But Paul never phoned the next day, though Diddy and Hester didn't go out. Nor on any of the days following.

*   *   *

In the first days after their quarrel, Diddy and Hester seemed to move about more quietly, for the most part in silence. Both in a state of shock, as Diddy thought. Reluctant for any kind of contact other than the sexual one. But gradually the rhythm of their days became less haunted, took on renewed vigor. Although still extremely quiet. Passing days on end indoors. Since the daily walk was abandoned, seldom leave the apartment.

Whether this was originally Hester's desire or Diddy's—he isn't sure—both wish it (now). Diddy doesn't even have the one morning and two evening strolls with Xan any more, having turned the dog over to the ASPCA. Far from subsiding, as Diddy had expected, Hester's antipathy to the animal worsened. Xan began to react. Shrank under the couch when Hester entered the living room; became servile and overagitated when Diddy fed or combed him or got out the leash for their walks. If Diddy thought he might have been able to resurrect the old Xan, lively and spirited, he would never have given his pet up. But he didn't. Accepted the dog's transformation as irrevocable. He didn't like Xan any more.

Though he's not aware of actively missing the creature on whom he'd lavished so much balked affection for the last two years, possibly some vacuum (now) does exist in Diddy's heart. Of which he's unaware. Some yearning for the kind of loving dialogue possible only with an animal; at least only with someone who doesn't speak. And this may be the reason—if a reason is needed—why he was thinking all last weekend of something he'd once written. In his sophomore year in college, Diddy had started a novel, and worked on it fairly diligently for a year. Called
The Story of the Wolf-Boy.
And written in the first person, for Diddy couldn't imagine the story being narrated by anyone except the hero himself. He never dared show his effort to anyone, teacher or friend. Sure that he'd then realize he had no talent for writing. And since abandoning it, when he became serious about his pre-med courses, never again attempted any fiction. But he must have valued it. While never rereading a single page, he'd kept the manuscript all these years. Both the first draft, written into three loose-leaf notebooks with a Parker pen, his mother's gift when he graduated from high school; and the second draft, which he'd typed. (Now) he'd like to read his “novel” aloud to Hester and to himself.

Knows exactly where it is. In that heavy cardboard box, the one never opened, on the shelf in the front hall closet. In which are stored, among other things:

report cards from grammar school;

four high-school yearbooks and twenty-five issues of the weekly school paper from his senior year when he was Managing Editor;

his diplomas;

long manila envelopes stuffed with photographs of himself and Paul as children;

the crude slingshot he'd made when he was eight;

his “Catholic” diaries, from the age of twelve to fifteen;

his letters in track and basketball;

an album pasted full of clippings from newspapers and magazines about Paul, concert programs, and other miscellaneous souvenirs of his brother's career, up to 1960 only;

the watercolor portrait of Pasteur he did when he was ten;

some Stevenson campaign buttons;

a bulky package tied up with string that holds all the letters, as many as three a day, the notes, and the telegrams Joan and he exchanged during the first two months after they'd met.

Takes down the box. But it's not there. Neither the written nor the typed version. How is that possible? Look again! Diddy sure there's no way in which it could have been gotten lost or been thrown out without his knowledge. Diddy the Methodical rummages in other likely places. Eventually, going through all the closets, drawers, and boxes in the apartment. The manuscript nowhere to be found.

One other thing is missing from the cardboard box. The gold medal Paul got when he won the Chopin Prize at the age of eighteen. “You keep it for me, Diddy,” Paul had said negligently, when he came back from Warsaw. Putting it on Diddy's dinner plate, grinning. Diddy could never decide whether it meant Paul was more fond of him than he'd supposed or cared less than he supposed about the unexpected victory and becoming famous overnight. On the balance, Paul's surprising present felt more like a hex than a fraternal blessing. Thinking that Paul might ask for it back one day, Diddy had never had the nerve to chuck it into the trash bin. But when, after dumping the contents of the cardboard box on the hall floor to make sure his manuscript wasn't there, he noticed, almost in passing, that the medal in its handsome leather and velvet case was also gone, he felt a distinct relief.

But the disappearance of
The Story of the Wolf-Boy
was something else.

Diddy trying not to be too depressed by the inexplicable loss of his manuscript. Reminding himself it wasn't anything more than adolescent junk. Couldn't have been really good. So, not a true loss. But painful anyway. He had so looked forward to reading it to Hester. To bestow a part of him never shared with anyone, something he'd kept secret from even Joan. And he'd gotten an intimation that the story might in some way have eased the barely perceptible ache he suffers from giving up Xan. Nothing as strong as solace. Still, the themes connect.

Hester has come from the living room; is standing near him. “What are you doing, Dalton? Are you looking for something?”

Oh, just sorting out some old junk. Getting rid of things.

About the best that Diddy can do is to resurrect, in a recurrent dream, a parody or fragment of the bizarre story set down in his lost manuscript. This, just about the only dream he has (now), arrives as a welcome change from the dreams—unrememberable nightmares, rather—plaguing him for the last month. Dreams that had laid Diddy low; awakening most mornings with the sensation that a huge flat stone is lying on his chest. But from this dream and its variants, Diddy often awakens pleasantly, feeling lighter, somewhat purged.

Dreamed,
The Story of the Wolf-Boy
retains something of its origins, the “literary” qualities Diddy might have admired when he was a novel-reading college sophomore. Grave, slowly paced, somewhat overembellished with naturalistic detail. While recurring over a period of several weeks, the dream kept pretty close to the original plot. The only significant variations were in the ending.

In its standard form, the dream begins with a prologue. Diddy meeting the Wolf-Boy, who is crying. Although there are times during the dream when the Wolf-Boy looks thoroughly human, as ordinary-human as anyone could wish, he's really an animal. Diddy knows it. The Wolf-Boy knows it. In fact, this is why he's crying. Because he's an animal, and because he aspires to be something better. What is better? End of prologue.

The dream proper divides into two parts.

In Part I, the Wolf-Boy recounts the history of his life; beginning with his birth. Diddy listens, with the reaction so common in dreams. Being surprised by what he hears, following it with suspense. And simultaneously feeling that it's an old story he has heard many times, but is nonetheless glad to hear through once again.

The Wolf-Boy's story. Tells Diddy that he was born into a respectable circus family, the Shaws; an only child; and christened Hiawatha after his paternal grandfather, a full-blooded Cherokee. His father was an acrobat who worked on the high wire, his mother a lion tamer originally from Budapest. Both aristocrats among circus performers, for possessing skills that are rare but not freakish and for not being physically deformed. Passed a happy and fairly adventurous childhood on the road with his parents until they were both killed in an automobile accident. In North Platte, Nebraska, where the circus had been performing for almost a week at a fair. Young Hiawatha was just fourteen.

The orphan was quickly adopted by the person his parents had considered their best friend in the troupe. Lyndon the sword swallower, a man already treated by Hiawatha as a favorite uncle; whom he'd known as long as he could remember and always liked. But, as a step-parent, this man disclosed a fund of meanness the boy had never suspected. Neglect, which was decorated by sarcasm, which was enhanced by all sorts of petty indignities. Until the final, most cruel of wounds. One day, in a totally unjustified rage at the boy, the sword swallower told him icily that his dead parents hadn't really been his parents. “Now you think you're a foundling, huh? Maybe you even think that's exciting. Something classy. Like you might be really the son of a prince or a movie star. Wait! Don't get your hopes up, kiddo. There's more.” Lyndon punched himself in the head to stop laughing. Then settled back, snapping his suspenders. “This is a good story. Not with one of your sissy milksop happy endings.”

Hiawatha Shaw not only not the son of the Shaws; but of no one like them, either. What he was, in fact, was the offspring of two giant apes who had been with the circus many years ago as part of an African act. A mutant, a freak birth, a sport of nature without medical precedent. Of course, the pink hairless human infant was taken away from its animal progenitors immediately. Minutes after his birth on the straw of the apes' cage. And claimed by the amiable, childless couple who had raised him.

“Does everyone in the circus know about it?” Hiawatha asked, trying to stifle his sobs.

“Yeah, everyone,” said the sword swallower. “They were plenty shocked, too, when you dropped out of that big gorilla's twat, though it takes a lot to shock circus people. Wanted to shoot you, right off the bat. Not even register your birth. Doing you a favor. An act of mercy. Nobody could have gotten into trouble for it. Who would have believed you even existed? I know I was for doing it. The manager, too. Said you were an insult to Providence or something, that the Almighty would want you to be dead. Now, I didn't hold no truck with that religious stuff, but I was on his side.”