HardScape (15 page)

“Fifty-five years.”

“You weren't unhappy.”

“I was very happy. It's a lovely house.”

“It's your house.”

“Not any more…” She gazed past me at the ugly little farmhouse she had grown up in. It was one small step up from a shack. Her father had attempted to improve it back in the 'Fifties with asphalt shingles. “Down here, people don't turn up their noses.”

“Mother, you had dozens of friends on Main Street.”

“Down here everyone's got someone in their family who's been to prison.”

Stung again, I fired back, “That's just because they're easier to catch.”

“It's not funny. All my so-called friends, I knew what they were thinking, they were thinking, Ben's Chevalley blood came out. My blood. Your father never would have had such a son if it weren't for Margot Chevalley.”

“Oh, Mom—”

“You erased fifty years of slowly fitting in, slowly getting accepted.”

“I didn't mean to.”

“I don't mind,” she said, fingers flying. “I never fit in. They knew it. I knew it.”

“Dad loved you. Connie loves you.”

“Connie is a Christian. Which is more than I can say for most of that crowd.”

I stood there shaking my head, helpless to unravel the strands of hurt and imagined hurt. I thought that she had been living alone too long with no one to talk to. Telling her that wouldn't do anything to cut through her confusion, however. Nor, I had to admit, was it entirely confusion. There was a diamond-bright core of truth at the center of my mother's thinking. The women she had called her friends—the wives of my father's school chums and neighbors—were, by and large, prisoners of their neat, orderly lives and hostages to their belief that appearances on earth mirrored God's image of their souls. But they served a second master, a pagan garden-farm god, who both taunted and comforted them with daily evidence that, God-be-damned, good stock was all. Good seed will out. Bad blood will out. I was the tainted product. Proof that Margot Chevalley couldn't escape her fate.

No wonder she had suspected me of flying coke with Renny. The poor thing thought it was her fault.

“I'm sorry,” I apologized again. It had not occurred to me, back when I was standing up for my own principles, that I wouldn't be the only one to pay. I had survived the public censure of the court, survived the fines that took every penny I had earned in the 'Eighties, survived prison. Now I felt like a commando who had penetrated enemy territory and lived to tell tales of far-off victory and dead friends. And to wonder if it was worth it.

***

“Your mother's a wreck,” Connie said in the car. The afternoon sky had turned dark. It looked like rain.

“I know.”

“What did you say to her?”

“Exactly what I told you.”

“Don't get snippy with me, young man.” Her nap had set her up, and she was rarin' to go.

“Sorry. I'm a little upset myself.”

Connie sat silently until we were well out of Frenchtown. Then she said, “Would you entertain some advice from someone old enough to know better?”

“Right now I'd take advice from a three-year-old.”

“Since you've come home—and it's been what, three years now?”

“Two years.” Less time than I had served in prison.

“Since you've come home you've remained somewhat detached. You're here, but not here.”

“That's not true. I'm running the office. I may not be getting rich at it, but in this climate survival's an achievement.”

“Yes, yes, yes. But we're not discussing earning your living. You are earning your living, I suppose, and maintaining your family's business. That's all well and good. But you're living like a stranger in your own town.”

“So?”

“Don't interrupt.…I'm trying to find the proper words to describe what's become of you.…It's as if your old friends have grown up normally, while you're still the boy who left… I know what it is! You're like a reformed drunk, missing part of your emotional past.…It's high time you got involved. Time to embrace something.”

“Or someone?” I asked, scoping out where she was leading.

“You could do worse than the first selectman.”

“Vicky doesn't need a felon in her career.”

“Do you propose to spend the rest of your life getting over prison?”

“Now wait a minute, Connie.”

“I have seen four generations come home from terrible wars. Most get over it and move on with their lives. Those who can't fell on the battlefield. They simply didn't know it.…Did you die in prison, Ben?”

“No.”

Her eyes flashed at me through her Lilly Daché veil. “Then what are you waiting for?”

“I thought I was doing pretty well. That wasn't me in Renny's plane, despite my mother's worries. It was Renny. And it wasn't me who shot Ron Pearlman. It was God knows who. I'm not sure why all this is falling on my head.”

“Because you seem susceptible,” said my aunt. “Neither here nor there.”

I cogitated that in sullen silence. The rain, which had been looming darkly, started all of a sudden. Four or five fat drops splashed on the windshield, and the next instant it sluiced the Lincoln like a firehose. I turned on lights and wipers and powered the driver's seat forward so I could lean into the glass. The road gleamed slick and black, coated in patches of yellow maple leaves.

“My poor delphiniums,” moaned Connie. “They bloomed again, but the stems are weak.”

“We'll be home in a few minutes. I'll stake them for you.”

“No thank you. I imagine you've got your own to prop.”

My delphiniums, in fact, were giving every indication of premature death, but I didn't say so, being too busy concentrating on the road, which was flowing like a river.

“Ben, look out! Where are you going?”

“I see him.”

An idiot in a huge, windowless van was actually attempting to pass. Figuring he was drunk or suffering a genuine emergency, I veered toward the narrow shoulder to make room.

“Ben!”

Having given him much of the road and all of the shoulder, I had nowhere to go when he cut in on me. I blew the horn to wake him up, but suddenly he was alongside like a moving wall. I caught a glimpse of one of those little round tinted plastic bubble portholes in the sheet metal and, through that distorting lens, the gleam of an eager face urging on the driver, whom I couldn't see.

How did I know he was urging him on? Two clues. A maniacal, toothy grin, and the shockingly loud crash as the van and Connie's Lincoln smacked flanks.

“Ben!” Connie cried, frightened, and cried out again as her head cracked hard on her window.

He came at me again. To my right there was a stretch of old-fashioned guard wire—two strands affixed to wooden posts sufficiently sturdy to prevent a baby carriage tumbling into the deep ditch beside the road. I jerked the steering wheel left. The second crash was much louder. Glass shattered in the rear. Rain and road poured in, but the old car gave back as good as it took and bounced the van halfway across its lane. I floored the accelerator. Multi-barreled reserve carburetors, which hadn't breathed fire since they left the factory, cut in with a heartening roar. God bless Renny, who had kept them tuned. We took off, forging ahead.

Unfortunately, the road curved left. Nor did the shoulder get any wider. The van, too, had a splendid engine, and its driver was very, very good. Higher up, he spotted the end of the guard wire before I did. He couldn't overtake, but he could hit me hard near the rear end and he did, with such force that my rear tires broke loose from the slick road. Swerving wide left, he disappeared around the bend. The Lincoln fishtailed and skidded violently.

I like cars, but I've never been the world's greatest driver. I think I could have powered the front-wheel-drive Olds out of the skid, but in Connie's car I didn't have that option. Despite my best efforts with the power steering, the Lincoln spun hard against the wire, plowed up a hundred feet of posts, and slammed into the ditch, with its tail in the air at a forty-five-degree angle and its nose in the mud.

“Connie!”

We were hanging half upside-down in the car, Connie limp in her seatbelt, one leg covered in blood. I was bleeding too, from where the horn had broken and sliced a finger, which I discovered as I spread more blood trying to help her.

She had a terrible bump on her brow where she'd hit the window and a gash on her knee, which had come in contact with a chrome air vent. Her skin, so thin that it was translucent, had parted like paper, and there was blood everywhere.

“Connie?”

She looked frail, and tiny, and every one of her ninety years. She opened her eyes, glanced wildly about. I could see her hover on the edge of mind-emptying shock. In that endless moment, fear and confusion threatened to overwhelm her. I didn't know what to do. It was like watching a porcelain vase teeter on the shelf.

“Connie, I'll get help. Can you hear me?”

“What happened?”

“We ran off the road.”

She blinked a couple of times. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, look at my leg. …”

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes.…No. Yes. Not too much.…” She looked around at the steaming hood angled into the mud, at the tangled guard wire, the trees we'd wedged between, the pouring rain. Then, to my immense relief, her gaze steadied and she was suddenly Connie again. “Ben, you've gone and smashed my car. Help me out of this. I'm all tangled.”

***

The volunteer ambulance arrived in ten minutes, by which time a dozen cars had stopped and people had helped Connie out of the ditch into a Pontiac. She greeted the nurse and driver by name. Under no circumstances, she informed them, was she going to the hospital. “Just send Stevie Greenan around when he has a moment.”

The duty nurse was fighting a losing battle to take her blood pressure, after dressing the cut on her knee, and the driver kept pleading that the hospital should take X rays. I finally took him aside and explained that at her age Connie saw a visit to the hospital as a one-way ticket and got him to agree to just take her home and wait until Steve arrived. She wouldn't even do that, however, insisting that they might need the ambulance for someone else. She accepted a ride home in the Pontiac, while I stayed to answer surly questions put to me by Trooper Moody.

“How fast were you going?”

“Ten miles under the limit.”

“Come on, you're a speeder. You'll always be a speeder.”

“It was pouring.”

“And you say you just lost control?”

“I told you, a couple of guys in a van forced me off the road.”

“License number?”

“Yeah, right. Listen, Ollie, I didn't get a number, I didn't see the driver. But I know he was gunning for me.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Connie saw a little. Not much.”

“Did she get the number?”

“Number? She got her head smashed on the window.”

“Well, I'm going to issue a citation for failure to maintain control of your vehicle.”

“Ollie, I got run off the road.”

“Now who would want to run you off the road?”

“I don't know.”

“If Miss Abbott recalls the license number of this—what was it, a van?—you be sure to inform me right away. Until then, I've told you time and again to slow down. You drive like a maniac.”

“Look at the car. You can see where he hit me.”

The Lincoln was just emerging from the ditch at the end of a wrecker hook operated by Pinkerton Chevalley. I showed Ollie the broken rear-door window, a long scrape that scored both doors, and the rear bumper, which the van had ripped away from the fender on the driver's side. “There's where he hit me the last time—slewed the rear around, sent it skidding.”

Ollie surveyed the damage, then hunkered down and touched the metal with his big fingers. “All I see is where you hit that big rock down there. See where you chipped it? Gee, Ben, that's town property. Vicky McLachlan gets a load of what you done to her rock, she'll sue you.” He laughed, an unpleasant sound, and returned to fingering the scrape. “Here you can see where the guard wire ripped her up something fierce. Yup, you skidded, all right. Good thing you were wearing your seatbelts.”

He fixed me with a hard stare. “You
were
wearing your seatbelts?”

“That rock didn't break this window and you know it.”

Ollie pretended to inspect the shattered glass.

“I seen them pop like this all the time. You hit that safety glass just right and boom—gone.” He stood up and shook his head. “Funny thing, your new cars, the trim's all plastic, just breaks up in little bits. Fine old automobile like this, though, look at that chrome, all bent to hell. And will you look at that—you rammed the grill right through the radiator—Hey Pink, how you going to find a new radiator for a thirty-year-old Lincoln?”

Pink looked at him. For a second I thought he was going to call Ollie out, gun, badge, and all. Then he seemed to remember that the stewardship of Chevalley Enterprises had fallen into his thoroughly incompetent hands and that the state trooper had considerable say in who got called for towing jobs.

“We'll find a junker somewhere,” he said. “Don't you worry, Ollie.”

Ollie laughed. “I'm not worried. I didn't crack up
my
rich aunt's car.”

***

By the time Ollie got done harassing me and I caught a ride home to Main Street, Doctor Steve was waiting for me at Connie's. “She's okay. I put her to bed. But if she shows any disorientation—or especially any vomiting—then right in the hospital.”

“I better stay here tonight.”

“No. I already hired Betty Chevalley. I want a real nurse, just in case. How are you?”

“Fine, fine.”