Four Past Midnight (81 page)

“I don't . . . I don't know what you're talking about,” Sam said slowly, but that voice—faint, mocking, haunting—recurred:
Come with me, son . . . I'm a poleethman.
And his mouth was suddenly full of that taste again. The sugar-slimy taste of red licorice. His tastebuds cramped; his stomach rolled. But it was stupid. Really quite stupid. He had never eaten red licorice in his life. He hated it.

“I really don't get you,” he said, speaking more strongly.

“You're getting
something,”
Naomi said. “You look like someone just kicked you in the stomach.”

Sam glanced at her, annoyed. She looked back at him calmly, and Sam felt his heart rate speed up.

“Let it alone for now,” Dave said, “although you can't let it alone for long, Sam—not if you want to hold onto any hope of getting out of this. Let me tell you my story. I've never told it before, and I'll never tell it again ... but it's time.”

“I wasn't always Dirty Dave Duncan,” he began. “In the early fifties I was just plain old Dave Duncan, and people liked me just fine. I was a member of that same Rotary Club you talked to the other night, Sam. Why not? I had my own business, and it made money. I was a sign-painter, and I was a damned good one. I had all the work I could handle in Junction City and Proverbia, but I sometimes did a little work up in Cedar Rapids, as well. Once I painted a Lucky Strike cigarette ad on the right-field wall of the minor-league ballpark all the way to hell and gone in Omaha. I was in great demand, and I deserved to be. I was good. I was just the best sign-painter around these parts.

“I stayed here because serious painting was what I was really interested in, and I thought you could do that anywhere. I didn't have no formal art education—I tried but I flunked out—and I knew that put me down on the count, so to speak, but I knew that there were artists who made it without all that speed-shit bushwah—Gramma Moses, for one. She didn't need no driver's license; she went right to town without one.

“I might even have made it. I sold some canvases, but not many—I didn't need to, because I wasn't married and I was doing well with my sign-painting business. Also, I kept most of my pitchers so I could put on shows, the way artists are supposed to. I had some, too. Right here in town at first, then in Cedar Rapids, and then in Des Moines. That one was written up in the
Democrat,
and they made me sound like the second coming of James Whistler.”

Dave fell silent for a moment, thinking. Then he raised his head and looked out at the empty, fallow fields again.

“In AA, they talk about folks who have one foot in the future and the other in the past and spend their time pissin all over today because of it. But sometimes it's hard not to wonder what might have happened if you'd done things just a little different.”

He looked almost guiltily at Naomi, who smiled and pressed his hand.

“Because I
was
good, and I
did
come close. But I was drinkin heavy, even back then. I didn't think much of it—hell, I was young, I was strong, and besides, don't all great artists drink?
I
thought they did. And I still might have made it—made something, anyway, for awhile—but then Ardelia Lortz came to Junction City.

“And when she came, I was lost.”

He looked at Sam.

“I recognize her from your story, Sam, but that wasn't how she looked back then. You expected to see an old-lady librarian, and that suited her purpose, so that's just what you
did
see. But when she came to Junction City in the summer of '57, her hair was ash-blonde, and the only places she was plump was where a woman is supposed to be plump.

“I was living out in Proverbia then, and I used to go to the Baptist Church. I wasn't much on religion, but there were some fine-looking women there. Your mom was one of em, Sarah.”

Naomi laughed in the way women do when they are told something they cannot quite believe.

“Ardelia caught on with the home folks right away. These days, when the folks from that church talk about her—if they ever do—I bet they say things like ‘I knew from the very start there was
somethin
funny about that Lortz woman' or ‘I never trusted the look in that woman's eye,' but let me tell you, that wasn't how it was. They buzzed around her—the women as well as the men—like bees around the first flower of spring. She got a job as Mr. Lavin's assistant before she was in town a month, but she was teachin the little ones at the Sunday School out there in Proverbia two weeks before that.

“Just what she was teachin em I don't like to think—you can bet your bottom dollar it wasn't the Gospel According to Matthew—but she was teachin em. And everyone swore on how much the little ones loved her.
They
swore on it, too, but there was a look in their eyes when they said so ... a far-off look, like they wasn't really sure where they were, or even
who
they were.

“Well, she caught my eye . . . and I caught hers. You wouldn't know it from the way I am now, but I was a pretty good-lookin fella in those days. I always had a tan from workin outdoors, I had muscles, my hair was faded almost blonde from the sun, and my belly was as flat as your ironin board, Sarah.

“Ardelia had rented herself a farmhouse about a mile and a half from the church, a tight enough little place, but it needed a coat of paint as bad as a man in the desert needs a drink of water. So after church the second week I noticed her there—I didn't go often and by then it was half-past August—I offered to paint it for her.

“She had the biggest eyes you've ever seen. I guess most people would have called them gray, but when she looked right at you, hard, you would have sworn they were silver. And she looked at
me
hard that day after church. She was wearin some kind of perfume that I never smelled before and ain't never smelled since. Lavender, I think. I can't think how to describe it, but I know it always made me think of little white flowers that only bloom after the sun has gone down. And I was smitten. Right there and then.

“She was close to me—almost close enough for our bodies to touch. She was wearin this dowdy black dress, the kind of dress an old lady would wear, and a hat with a little net veil, and she was holdin her purse in front of her. All prim and proper. Her
eyes
weren't prim, though. Nossir. Nor proper. Not a bit.

“ ‘I hope you don't want to put advertisements for bleach and chewing tobacco all over my new house,' she says.

“ ‘No ma'am,‘ I says back. 'I thought just two coats of plain old white. Houses aren't what I do for a livin, anyway, but with you bein new in town and all, I thought it would be neighborly—‘

“ ‘Yes indeed,' she says, and touches my shoulder.”

Dave looked apologetically at Naomi.

“I think I ought to give you a chance to leave, if you want to. Pretty soon I'm gonna start tellin some dirty stuff, Sarah. I'm ashamed of it, but I want to clean the slate of my doins with her.”

She patted his old, chapped hand. “Go ahead,” she told him quietly. “Say it all.”

He fetched in a deep breath and went on again.

“When she touched me, I knew I had to have her or die tryin. Just that one little touch made me feel better—and crazier—than any woman-touch ever made me feel in my whole life. She knew it, too. I could see it in her eyes. It was a sly look. It was a mean look, too, but somethin about that excited me more than anything else.

“ ‘It
would
be neighborly, Dave,' she says, ‘and I want to be a very good neighbor.'

“So I walked her home. Left all the other young fellows standin at the church door, you might say, fumin and no doubt cursin my name. They didn't know how lucky they were. None of them.

“My Ford was in the shop and she didn't have no car, so we were stuck with shank's mare. I didn't mind a bit, and she didn't seem to, neither. We went out the Truman Road, which was still dirt in those days, although they sent a town truck along to oil it every two or three weeks and lay the dust.

“We got about halfway to her place, and she stopped. It was just the two of us, standin in the middle of Truman Road at high noon on a summer's day, with about a million acres of Sam Orday's corn on one side and about two million of Bill Humpe's corn on the other, all of it growin high over our heads and rustlin in that secret way corn has, even when there's no breeze. My granddad used to say it was the sound of the corn growin. I dunno if that's the truth or not, but it's a spooky sound. I can tell you that.

“ ‘Look!' she says, pointin to the right. ‘Do you see it?'

“I looked, but I didn't see nothing—only corn. I told her so.

“ ‘I'll show you!' she says, and runs into the corn, Sunday dress and high heels and all. She didn't even take off that hat with the veil on it.

“I stood there for a few seconds, sorta stunned. Then I heard her laughin. I heard her laughin in the corn. So I ran in after her, partly to see whatever it was she'd seen, but mostly because of that laugh. I was so randy. I can't begin to tell you.

“I seen her standin way up the row I was in, and then she faded into the next one, still laughin. I started to laugh, too, and went on through myself, not carin that I was bustin down some of Sam Orday's plants. He'd never miss em, not in all those acres. But when I got through, trailin cornsilk off my shoulders and a green leaf stuck in my tie like some new kind of clip, I stopped laughin in a hurry, because she wasn't there. Then I heard her on the other side of me. I didn't have no idea how she could have got back there without me seein her, but she had. So I busted back through just in time to see her runnin into the next row.

“We played hide n seek for half an hour, I guess, and I couldn't catch her. All I did was get hotter and randier. I'd think she was a row over, in front of me, but I'd get there and hear her two rows over,
behind
me. Sometimes I'd see her foot, or her leg, and of course she left tracks in the soft dirt, but they weren't no good, because they seemed to go every which way at once.

“Then, just when I was startin to get mad—I'd sweat through my good shirt, my tie was undone, and my shoes was full of dirt—I come through to a row and seen her hat hangin off a corn-plant with the veil flippin in the little breeze that got down there into the corn.

“ ‘Come and get me, Dave!' she calls. I grabbed her hat and busted through to the next row on a slant. She was gone—I could just see the corn waverin where she'd went through—but both her shoes were there. In the next row I found one of her silk stockins hung over an ear of corn. And still I could hear her laughin. Over on my blind side, she was, and how the bitch got there, God only knows. Not that it mattered to me by then.

“I ripped off my tie and tore after her, around and around and dosey-doe, pantin like a stupid dog that don't know enough to lie still on a hot day. And I'll tell you somethin—I broke the corn down everywhere I went. Left a trail of trampled stalks and leaners behind me. But
she
never busted a one. They'd just waver a bit when she passed, as if there was no more to her than there was to that little summer breeze.

“I found her dress, her slip, and her garter-belt. Then I found her bra and step-ins. I couldn't hear her laughin no more. There wasn't no sound but the corn. I stood there in one of the rows, puffin like a leaky boiler, with all her clothes bundled up against my chest. I could smell her perfume in em, and it was drivin me crazy.

“ ‘Where are you?' I yelled, but there wasn't no answer. Well, I finally lost what little sanity I had left . . . and of course, that was just what she wanted.
‘Where the fuck are you?'
I screamed, and her long white arm reached through the corn-plants right beside me and she stroked my neck with one finger. It jumped the shit out of me.

“ ‘I've been waiting for you,' she said. ‘What took you so long? Don't you want to see it?' She grabbed me and drawed me through the corn, and there she was with her feet planted in the dirt, not a stitch on her, and her eyes as silver as rain on a foggy day.”

Dave took a long drink of water, closed his eyes, and went on.

“We didn't make love there in the corn—in all the time I knew her, we never made love. But we made
somethin.
I had Ardelia in just about every way a man can have a woman, and I think I had her in some ways you'd think would be impossible. I can't remember all the ways, but I can remember her body, how white it was; how her legs looked; how her toes curled and seemed to feel along the shoots of the plants comin out of the dirt; I can remember how she pulled her fingernails back and forth across the skin of my neck and my throat.

“We went on and on and on. I don't know how many times, but I know I didn't never get tired. When we started I felt horny enough to rape the Statue of Liberty, and when we finished I felt the same way. I couldn't get enough of her. It was like the booze, I guess. Wasn't any way I could
ever
get enough of her. And she knew it, too.

“But we finally
did
stop. She put her hands behind her head and wriggled her white shoulders in the black dirt we was layin in and looked up at me with those silvery eyes of hers and she says, ‘Well, Dave? Are we neighbors yet?'

“I told her I wanted to go again and she told me not to push my luck. I tried to climb on just the same, and she pushed me off as easy as a mother pushes a baby off'n her tit when she don't want to feed it no more. I tried again and she swiped at my face with her nails and split the skin open in two places. That finally damped my boiler down. She was quick as a cat and twice as strong. When she saw I knew playtime was over, she got dressed and led me out of the corn. I went just as meek as Mary's little lamb.