John's Wife: A Novel (55 page)

It had been a beautiful day, one that, it seemed, could go on forever, so it was almost a surprise when all of a sudden the light began to fade and twilight fell. Out at the edge of town, Mitch popped the Lincoln’s lights on as he pulled into the parking lot at the retirement home (didn’t want to hit one of these old dodderers wandering around, they’d sue your ass off), thinking about retirement himself, but not here, one reason being he wouldn’t mind getting away from some of the old ladies in town who once were not so old. Aging with your wife was one thing, seeing what your old loves turned into really took the starch out, something his son didn’t seem to mind so much, having perhaps more starch to start with. Other car lights were coming on around town as well: Lorraine’s on her way back to the party, for example; Nevada’s as, disappointed, she pulled away from the airport; Cornell’s on the back road to the Ford-Mercury garage. Stu wanted to turn the light on in the office out there, but Rex said no. Waldo, snuggled into his lovenest, as he liked to call it, also preferred the lights off, the invading dimness adding a kind of melancholy beauty to this simple little room where he felt more at home than in his own home. Sassy Buns said it was like nowhere, man, like some piece of sterile shit they’d sent into orbit and then forgot about, but her shoes and shirt were off and her sudden anger when he’d made the mistake of calling her Sassy Buns to her face (“You got some kinda sick buttocks fetish, old man?” she’d snapped, and Waldo had had to admit: “Yeah, haw! I sure do …”) had subsided and he had the impression she was enjoying the luxury nose powder he’d procured for her. Until she said: “Phew, what’s this shit been cut with, bathroom cleanser?” Waldo had paid top dollar and was sure of his source, she was just giving him a hard time. As he would do for her, sweet thing, in turn. Dutch was not behind the two-way mirror watching them for once: to hell with all that. In fact he was thinking of closing down the Back Room, his days and nights were getting too mixed up. He’d woken up in his office when the staff came in to tell him about the thefts of food and linens. He didn’t remember having fallen asleep in the office, but he was glad he was there instead of someplace else. He’d checked out the losses, called Otis. He’d thought that was this morning, just a little while ago, but now the sun had suddenly gone down and Otis and a couple of his cops were in his front office, taking down the numbers. He decided he’d also lay off the beer for a few days. After he finished the one in his hand. Otis was trying to recruit him for some kind of posse he was getting up, but Dutch said he planned to stay right here, stand guard over what was left. Otis gave him a two-way radio to use in case the two thieves showed up again and asked him who brought John’s Porsche out here? Dutch didn’t know. “Has it been parked out there awhile?” “Can’t say.” Otis was used to running John’s cars home of late and he had to go there anyway. As usual, the keys were in the ignition, so he sent the others to pick up Duwayne at the jail and meet him at John’s while he checked out the golf course and the airport in the Porsche, following other leads. He was not happy about the onset of darkness. Made the hunt harder. But he couldn’t wait until tomorrow, Corny and Pauline had become a serious threat to the community and they had to be stopped now. The country club looked shut down and empty as he swung by, enjoying the machine he was in, though in fact Marge was out there on her own, caught out by the sudden twilight while cutting through a dogleg on the back nine and unable to find her ball on the other side of it for a moment even though it was in the middle of the fairway. She knew she should quit, but she was still blowing off steam, running her aborted mayoral campaign from hole to hole as if from issue to issue. Her golf shoes had been in the car trunk with her clubs, but with the clubhouse closed, she’d been forced to play in her business suit, which made her feel like she was clapped in irons and greatly stifled her drives. She could sense the terrible weariness of the long day overtaking her and felt about to drop, but there were only a couple of holes to go and she had to walk them to reach her car anyway. There was no one else out here, so she unbuttoned her blouse and rolled her skirt up around her waist and, loosened up now, took her frustrations out on her approach shot. Which was a beauty. Lofted up out of sight, then falling down through the dusk onto the middle of the green and rolling backwards toward the hole. Seemed to disappear. Hey! Had she holed out? Beautiful!

Meanwhile, back at the center of the dying day’s doings in John’s backyard, where the garden lights were coming on, the guests were reluctantly preparing to make their farewells, lingering for a last drink or maybe a couple, perhaps one more of those juicy quarter-pounders, said to have been ground from the flanks of blue-ribbon winners at the last 4-H Fair upstate, or else a final handful of crunchy liqueur-filled chocolates, imported direct from Switzerland, or even both at the same time, in the same bun, why not—any macaroni salad left?—Pioneers Day only happens once a year. This was what Lorraine saw when she returned with Waldo’s shotgun, loaded with buckshot, in her fist: a lot of drunks falling goofily about in the gathering dark with their jaws snapping. How long had she been gone? Off-key party songs were erupting here and there, yips and shouts, loose laughter like belches, the birds and crickets, slow off the mark, now making up for lost time in raucous chorus behind it all. Reverend Lenny and a deflated Trixie were cradling a newborn, still red in the face, under a bug light on the back deck, surrounded by oohers and ahers, Daphne among them, telling everyone Stu had something to do at the garage, he’d be here soon; Lorraine heard the same thing twice like an echo: it was a recital, the woman desperately clinging to the only thing she could remember, her mind otherwise murky as a sump pit. The shotgun got a certain amount of attention as she passed through the crowds, but as far as Lorraine could tell not many people even knew who she was. Out in the pot-scented rose garden, where children were chasing lightning bugs, John’s daughter, in a seething rage, was snorting something through a straw; the girl’s furious thoughts were incoherent, but Lorraine empathized with their import: insult, betrayal, murder on her mind. “Sure, be glad to give you a lift,” some guy standing in the flower beds said as Lorraine drifted past, “how’s this?” “Woops! There went my drink!” “Ha ha! Wait here, I’ll bring you a new one.” “Just a little one!” “Don’t worry, honey, it’s all he’s got!” No one tending the glowing barbecue pit, where meat burned quietly. Caterers were collecting empty pans and dishes, picking up some of the rubbish in black plastic bags. Lorraine found an abandoned whiskey glass and downed its contents. Yeuck. Stale and watery with a butt at the bottom. Still a shot or two at the bottom of one of the bottles: she finished that off, too, sucking from the neck. Nearby, Veronica sat slumped in a lawnchair, still as a stone. The image in her head was fetal and slimy and its name was Second John. The image seemed locked there like a fixed exhibit in an empty room, and Lorraine understood that head was badly damaged. Takes one to know one, she said with a shudder, and rubbed her aching brow with her free hand. She climbed up past the Holy Family, kicking a couple of beercans aside (Daphne was saying: “Something he had to do out at the car lot…”), and went into the kitchen, where Marge’s one-eyed Trevor was huddled miserably over a hot cup of coffee, his sick hangover making Lorraine’s hurt head hurt the more. Kevin was in the hallway, leaning against the john door, hustling a bank teller with a sad story. No Sweet Abandon, all tattered and torn. No Waldo either. Lorraine didn’t need to tune in to get the rest of the story. She knew where they were.

Thus, John’s annual Pioneers Day barbecue drew, somewhat abruptly, toward a close, for some a pleasure, others not, some lives changed by it, most merely in some small wise spent, a few wishing it could go on forever, others that it had never happened, or, having happened, that it could be forgotten, of all wishes wished, the one most likely to be granted; but first, while many were still finishing their last, or nearly last, drink, police chief Otis arrived, raised his bullhorn, and addressed the remaining guests in John’s backyard.

He said: “Folks, sorry to butt in here when you’re having a good time, but this town’s got a serious problem and I need your help!” There was applause, and Edna clapped, too, because Floyd did. But were the others applauding the police officer or the problem? It seemed a touch wild out here and she wished she was back home, just her old simple home with the running toilet, forget grand ambitions. Like her stepmother always said: Edna, sometimes the worse thing can happen to you is getting your dreams come true. “If you haven’t been home today,” the burly police officer hollered through his bullhorn, “you probably been robbed!” Oh dear. That got everybody’s attention. At least the new porcelain lamp was safe in the trunk of the car, though she didn’t know if she ever really wanted to see it again. The officer went on to tot up all the crimes that the giant lady and the mental boy from the drugstore had committed, and she could see by the tall list why he hadn’t wanted to bother about a mix-up with one little secondhand rug. His voice, which sounded like an old radio broadcast, seemed to be coming out of the night sky. It had got dark almost as soon as he’d begun to talk and now you couldn’t hardly see his face, it was like a curtain had dropped. “People around town are reporting dented cars and broke doors and windows and shingles knocked off roofs,” his voice said. “They’ve used a airport hangar like a latrine, there’s a church been desecrated and busted up, she’s almost completely indecent and scaring little kids, and everywhere she goes she’s leaving a filthy trail of slime and garbage!” “If I was completely indecent,” some lady squawked in a high voice, “I’d scare
everybody!”
The people around her laughed and said “I know what you mean,” but if it was a joke, Edna didn’t get it. But then she was not in a humorous mood. She felt ashamed and confused and responsible for the change that had come over Floyd ever since leaving the police station. She and Floyd were standing talking to the bank president and his wife, he having taken a sudden new interest in Floyd what with his promotion, and what his wife said now was: “You work so hard to make a decent life for yourself and then these irresponsible ruffians come along and try to take it away from you, it just doesn’t seem fair!” “No,” said Edna, “it don’t rightly,” and the policeman with the bullhorn said: “And now she’s got so big she’s disrupting traffic and bringing down phone lines and TV antennas!” Fortunately the lady’s husband was so drunk he didn’t notice how Floyd, who’d been so friendly and fairly popping his britches with big money talk before, had pretty much shrunk back into his old squint-eyed meanness, untrusting and shutmouth, except when he had something to recite from the Bible, and moresoever since the police turned up. The sour old Floyd was not so good at impressing bankers maybe, but Edna knew how to talk to the old one better than the new smiley one who scared her with his noisy swoll-up ways, and so she told him now plain out that she never took that rug, that John’s wife give it to her and just went away and left her stuck in all that trouble, and where
was
she anyhow, and Floyd, finally listening to her, said what the hell are these buggers trying to do to us, you think? The police chief meanwhile was introducing the new mayor who got up and declared that this was a tough ballgame, but they all had to hunker down and dig in and get ready for a butt-kicking bone-crunching free fight. “We gotta get our back off the mat!” he shouted through the bullhorn. “That’s one big piece a meat out there and she’s playin’ hardball with us, so now it’s our job to team up and take her out! Together, neighbors, we can do it!” Floyd said: “We’ll be goin’ now.” “We should oughta say goodbye and thank you,” Edna said, but she wasn’t sure who to, except maybe the little boy. “It don’t matter,” Floyd said. “Come on.”

While his old coach and math teacher, who was now the mayor, however that had happened, was winding up the crowd in his punchy lockerroom style, telling them about the shoot-out at the old airport hangar and how the bandits nearly ran him down, Otis, given the first moment he’d had in what seemed like weeks just to catch his breath and think, posed the question to himself: What had he set in motion here? What was the final objective of these troops he was lining up? Would Pauline, as Snuffy’s rhetoric and even his own as he thought back on it seemed to imply, have to be, well, taken out? This had not been his original game plan. He’d set out just to bring Pauline home and turn her over to people who knew more about how to deal with her problem. If only she hadn’t broke out and teamed up with that dimwit from the drugstore. Of course she had to get out, she was hungry: Otis remembered how she had demolished that bag of doughnuts and wished now he’d brought her a couple hundred bags more. Though that wouldn’t have been enough either, she was one ravenous lady. Her husband should have done something, damn it, all of this could have been prevented. But, that’s right, he had been under arrest. Or, rather, he’d been a temporary guest of the police department. So things happened. Too many things, really, for Otis to be able to manage them all, one crisis piling up on another, civic order collapsing around his ears, and then all those crimes they committed, seemed like he was getting a call a minute, they were running him ragged, and so, next thing he knew, here he was in John’s backyard forming up an armed posse to go out and hunt both of them down. He glanced over toward the cruiser in the drive where Pauline’s daddy sat, manacled, in the backseat, grinning out at him under his ballcap. He spat through the gap in his teeth, dirtying the inside of the cruiser window. The incorrigible bastard. A menace to society. And not just mean and crazy but no doubt a cold-blooded murderer as well. If he were genuinely serious about justice, Otis should’ve tried to find out years ago about that “dead sister” Pauline had chillingly described during their investigative sessions out at the trailer, and whatever it was had happened to her missing momma. So he was taking a big risk getting Duwayne released to him like this, the sonuvabitch was dangerous even when locked up in a padded cell and he still harbored a homicidal grudge against Otis, blew a gob straight in his face first time he saw him today, then just grinned when Otis cocked his arm to throw the punch he couldn’t throw. But Pauline had often told Otis about all the times she’d tried to run away and how Daddy Duwayne always tracked her down and dragged her home to the trailer again, and Otis was running out of options. She had to be stopped, whatever that meant, and wherever she was. Still, he was having his doubts. Otis desperately wished John hadn’t taken off. He’d know what to do, as he always did. Otis had come here, not just because this was where most everyone in town he could count on could be found, but more because he needed John to lead this thing and see that it came out right. But no John, no anyone except the two kids, even John’s parents had checked out. Otis had brought the abandoned Porsche here and had had to give John’s daughter the keys, uneasy as that made him feel, and what she’d said was that her father had got called away on an emergency. A friend of hers was in trouble. A
former
friend, she’d added and turned away. And now he didn’t see her anywhere or the little boy either. A lot of people had left, even while he and Snuffy were speaking to them, and he found himself feeling a bit like a sheriff in one of those old oaters, come here like a fool to appeal to the cowardly cabbageheads in the town saloon. Of course he would not, like those forsaken sheriffs, have to face Pauline all alone, Otis knew that; on the contrary, the problem would be to keep the drunks, zanies, curiosity seekers, and hell-raisers away, which was mostly what he saw out there in the darkness now. Maybe he ought to postpone all this until morning when John got back. Hell, he didn’t even know where he was going to take his squad once he’d picked them. But then he got a call on his cellular phone from the Country Tavern out by Settler’s Woods: “They’s some humungous animal out here, Otis, looks a lot like a nekkid woman, and she just stomped the bejesus outa old Shag, he’s flatter’n a day-old pancake! And I can’t even find Chester, she musta et him!” Now it was murder. And he knew where they had to go. He took the bullhorn back.