House Haunted (12 page)

He looked at the phone.

His hand trembling like an old man's, cold hunching him over arthritically, he reached out to pick up the receiver.

As his finger touched it, a shot of pure heat went through his hand to his shoulder.

“Shit!”

He drew back in pain; then, slowly, he reached out to the phone again.

He laid his hand on it gently, hovering until sure there was no more heat.

His fingers like claws, he picked the phone up and brought it to his ear.

Hissing. He heard the hissing of long distance, distant voices swimming. They didn't sound like they were having human conversations. A thin, faraway crackle of laughter was pierced by an equally distant, high, humming scream.

The hissing intensified. He could
feel
her waiting out there for him.

“I know you're there,” he said.

The hissing modulated to what sounded like laughter. “I—” he began.

“Hello, Raymond,” she said.

Her voice was so crystal clear, so much like he had remembered it, calm, the way he had heard it in his waking and sleeping dreams for so long. He had known that this would be the way she would sound. He had played this moment out in his mind a thousand times. He had rehearsed each word he would say, the tone of his voice, the inflection of his calm outrage. But now that the moment was at hand, his powers of reason and reflection deserted him. Her voice was like a lancet piercing him; he was immobile with the very fear he had successfully battled, turned to bitterness and plans for battle, for so long. With her two calm words, “Hello, Raymond,” in her perfect, clear voice--clear as if she were standing beside him, whispering into his other ear—she had undone him.

He began to cry. He clutched the receiver so tightly to his ear that the thick plastic of its casing cracked in protest. He was frozen in fear and in loss: he thought he had battled her all this time, come to know her so intimately that her worst horrors could no longer trouble him, and with two simple introductory words she had easily mastered him.

“Would you like to destroy me, Ray?” she asked.

He wanted to use his voice, wanted to get out his words through the crying and the rigor of his limbs and thoughts.

 
“Yes.”

“Would you like to destroy me now?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember why you want to destroy me? Do you remember all the bad things I've done?”

Ray's lips trembled around the word. “Yes, Oh, God, yes.”

She laughed, gently. She was almost as gentle as his mother now. “Do you really hate me that much, Ray?”

“Yes! Jesus, yes! I want you to DIE!”

“You might get your wish yet, Ray. But you have to remember why you want me to die. Remember, Ray.” He wept. “Noooo . . .”

Memory . . .

His father's charter was late. Which wasn't surprising, since snow had been falling since morning and there was a good deal more predicted before nightfall. But the American Airlines clerk he'd spoken to before leaving for Stapleton International had assured him that the flight had left on time and that the airport would stay open for at least the next six hours.

“They have everything under control, sir,” the clerk had told him.

Sure
, he'd thought, hanging up the phone,
just like I do
.

It was no secret that he didn't want to see his father. He never did. They had never gotten along well since the death of his mother, and since ... well, since that other thing had happened, they had gotten along even less. Ray had thought for a while, with the glib analysis that young men often give to complex problems, that it was because they were just too much alike. But he knew now that glib analysis was just that, good for television but little else, and that the enmity that existed between himself and his father was a many-layered thing. Though they had the same blood, it ran in different directions. It always had. It was something Ray was ready to accept, and act on, with the kind of benign neglect he'd enacted the past couple of years.

But that didn't seem to be good enough for his father. For a time Ray thought that his father had learned his shallowness in Washington, but on deeper reflection he knew that the shallowness, the insistence on the surface details, the smiles, the friendly banter, the flatulent exchange of pleasantries, and, above all, the accordance of due, had always been there. As a boy, Ray remembered his father insisting on a regimen, an attention to details, that seemed on cursory examination a hewing to tradition, but on closer inspection revealed itself as an almost pathological need to control. At Sunday dinner there were “traditions”: his father would carve the roast just so, would serve just so, would enact by rote the same dialogue of approval to Ray's mother—”Great roast, Abby.”

“Wonderful potatoes.”

“Fine greens.”—and this, even if the roast was burned, the potatoes lumpy, the greens drowned in butter or undrained cooking water. There was such a need of control in his father—for after these epithets of approval would follow the required and inevitable assent from Ray himself, the withholding of which would result in the hardest of stares followed by a black mood that might last through the afternoon or entirely through the week.

And his father had never changed. The Senate had only emphasized and enriched these qualities. And, with Ray's inevitable rebellion from their stricture, a rupture in their relationship had followed and widened.

Only, it had always been there, as Ray had finally come to realize.

As Bridget had told him

He pushed Bridget from his mind. It was a measure of his father's domination over him, over his thoughts, his anger, that Ray had managed to forget Bridget for most of the car ride.

The old man had eight years on you, Bridget.

The snow was falling in huge flakes, but it seemed to have let up a little. The Volvo was doing the job so far, the Michelin radials churning him toward the airport a few exits away. As if to reinforce his thoughts, he heard the hissing whine of a jet engine as the huge belly of a landing 747 passed low overhead, its lights making the snowstorm into a Christmas scene.

At least if this were Christmas, not the end of February, he could understand his father coming to see him.

“Ray, old boy,” his father would say, “good to see you. Great tree you've got there.”

The expectant stare.

“Yeah, Dad, great tree—”

He threw his father from his mind and Bridget immediately filled the void. For a chilling moment he felt her sitting beside him in the front seat. The heat of the Volvo rose measurably. He saw her as he did in his dreams, reaching out to put her soft hand on his shoulder like a mother, whispering in his ear, telling him that she'd done everything for him

He gasped and looked to his right. He had swerved too far over, and a station wagon was honking at him, the driver beating the horn angrily, yelling at him wordlessly through the closed window and the snow and the night.

For the briefest moment, as he swerved back into the center lane, he thought he saw Bridget's fading outline in the passenger seat.

He concentrated on the road, getting his breath back. He looked briefly sideways; there was no one in the seat. It held his scarf only. The station wagon, not trusting his driving, had roared ahead, throwing up a plume of snow behind it.

He looked up and saw the lit exit sign for the airport.

He pulled into the wake of the station wagon and edged off the highway. Ahead, the airport loomed, quiet. The blinking green and red and white lights of the landed jumbo jet, taxiing quietly away from him, was the only activity.

“Shit, here comes the wait,” he muttered.

He parked the Volvo in the visitor's parking lot, grabbing his scarf as a last thought before closing and locking the door. Again something seemed to move on the passenger seat, but his stare produced only patterns of snow shadow from the sodium-vapor lamps overhead.

He wrapped the scarf around his neck and ran for the American Airlines terminal.

The American representative had, of course, been wrong. They were stacked up fifteen deep over the airport, and there was a possibility that Stapleton would close in the next half hour. His father's American Eagle flight was somewhere overhead, doing a slow circle, near the end of the pack.

“There's a possibility they'll get it down within the hour,” the rep said.

This time Ray said out loud, “Right.”

He found a gray padded seat near the observation window at the arrival gate and sat down. Snow melted on his topcoat—big flakes with patterns. They were beautiful, but for their transience. As he would begin to admire the symmetrical geometry of a flake's construction, it vanished before his eyes, transforming from art to a droplet of water on his Scotchguarded coat.

“Sir?”

It was Bridget's voice, and he started—but looked up to see the face of an American Airlines attendant. It had only sounded like her voice

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I was dozing off . . .”

“Are you Raymond Garver?” she asked, her smile returning. “Yes.”

“Your father has landed, sir. He was given priority, but they had to use a runway at the far end of the airport. He'll be in at Gate Fifty-two.”

“Thank you.”

She nodded, her smile following him as he rose and walked off. He had been staring at her, remembering that voice. She had obviously taken his stare for something else.

Gate 52 was not only at the far end of the airport, he had to leave the terminal and cross a parking lot in front of the Hertz Rent-A-Car terminal to get to it. It was a small private-plane terminal, little more than a hangar with a waiting room like a cab stand. His father was waiting for him.

“Where the
hell
have you been?” he said immediately.

“The American Airlines people—” he began, unable to halt the familiar apologetic tone.

“Screw American Airlines! I told them an hour ago to get you. We'll see what happens when those deregulation talks come up in May. If they think I don't forget things like this, the bastards are dumber than I thought. Where's your car?”

He told him, and his father's face turned beet red. “Goddamnit, you think I enjoy this shit? I spend three-quarters of my time in Washington dealing with assholes, and I have to come to fucking Denver in the middle of a fucking snowstorm to find more assholes?”

Ray began to walk away.

“Where the hell are you going?” his father called after him. Unaccountably, some of his anger had abandoned his voice.

Ray turned, snowflakes dandruffing his coat, his scarf, his hair. “I'm not going to take this shit anymore,” he said calmly.

Once more his father's face reddened; he fought to bring it under control and had managed to almost smile before the black look took him over.

“I don't ever want to hear you talk like that to me again,” he said, evenly.

“Then don't listen. And don't call me.” Ray turned and began to walk off again.

A landing Delta 727 screamed overhead at that moment, or he would have heard his father's footsteps crunching the snow, hurrying to catch up to him. “Wait a minute, son,” his father said, taking his arm, causing an almost physical repulsion.

Ray stared at him.

His father smiled—a smile as smooth and polished and layered as his psyche. “Let's just forget it, all right? Can we start over?”

Ray regarded him wordlessly; a snowflake blew into his open eye, blurring his sight, but when it blinked clean, his father was still showing his best-friend smile.

“Airlines are always screwing up,” his father reasoned, “let's blame it on them.”

In his life, he's never apologized to me, or anyone,
Ray thought suddenly.

“Come with me,” his father said, taking his arm and steering him back toward the tiny terminal building.

One phone call and ten minutes later, they were dropped off by an American Airlines staff limousine in front of Ray's car. His father smiled mischievously as they climbed into the Volvo. “Maybe I'll let the bastards off the hook yet in those hearings,” he said, then added conspiratorially, “and maybe I won't.” Then he laughed and said, “Let's go, son.”

After missing the airport exit once, during which his father stifled a red rage and merely muttered, “Just find it,” they were back on the highway. The snow had intensified. The Volvo's wipers, which hadn't been changed in three years, were streaking clumps of snow across the windshield in Ray's line of sight. The night had turned white and black. Near silence was punctuated by the swish of wipers and the occasional hissing slush of a passing car to either side.

Ray reached for the radio to end the silence, then drew his hand back.

“The hell with it. Why are you here, Dad?”

His father feigned preoccupation, turning from the windshield to squint at Ray. “What's that?” His thinning gray hair was plastered back away from his forehead by melted snow.