Morgan's Passing (43 page)

H
e was standing in Larrabee's Drugstore, waiting for his change. He'd bought a pack of Camels, a box of coughdrops, and a
Tindell Weekly Gazette
. The saleslady rang up his purchases, but then fell into conversation with another customer. It surely was cold, she agreed. It was much too cold to be March. Her cat wouldn't leave the stove and her dog was having to wear his little red plaid coat. She kept Morgan's change in her cupped hand, jingling it absently. Morgan stood waiting—an anonymous, bearded, bespectacled man of no interest to her. Finally he gave up and opened out his paper. He liked the
Gazette
very much, although it didn't carry Ann Landers. He scanned the personals.
I will not be responsible, I will not be responsible …

In the Lost and Found he learned that someone had lost a rubber plant. The things that some people mislaid! The carelessness of their lives! A complete set of Revereware cooking pots had been found in the middle of North Deale Road. A charm bracelet in the high-school parking lot.

Now for the obituaries. Mary Lucas, Long-Time Tindell Resident. Also Pearl Joe Pascal, and Morgan Gower, and …

He raised his head and looked around him. The drugstore was of old, dark wood, its shelves sparsely stocked. In some spots there was only one of an item—one box of Sweet 'N Low packets, its corners dented; one tube of Prell shampoo with a sticky green cap. It was definitely a real place. It smelled of damp cardboard. The saleslady was ancient, her skin so wrinkled that it seemed quilted, and her glasses hung on a chain around her neck.

“Sir,” the saleslady said, holding out his change.

He closed the newspaper and pocketed the money.

Outside, a cold, damp wind hit him. It was Sunday morning. The streets were empty and the sidewalks seemed wider and whiter than usual. All the other stores were closed—the little dimestore, the grocery store, the barbershop. He walked past them slowly. His pickup was parked in front of the Hollywood Stars Beautician. The red plywood box constructed over its truckbed (
MEREDITH PUPPET CO.
arching across each side) creaked in the wind. Morgan climbed into the cab. He opened his pack of cigarettes and lit one. Coughing his habitual, hacking cough, he spread out the paper again.

He set it down and started the engine. Fool paper; fool backwoods editors. Even they, you'd think, would have the common sense, the decency, to
check a thing like that before they printed it. Where were their standards? You call that journalism?

He drove up Main Street, puffing rapidly on his cigarette. At Main and Howell the traffic light was red. He braked, and glanced sideways at the paper.

Someone behind him honked, and he started off again. He veered from Howell into an alley, a moonscape of bleached, stubbled clay with a few empty beer bottles tossed in the weeds, and from there to the state highway. Up ahead lay the trailer park. A flaking metal sign spelled out
TINDELL ACRES MONTHLY RATES J. PROUTT PROPRIETOR
. He turned left on the gravel road and passed the office—a streamlined aluminum trailer whose cinderblock steps and flowerboxes attempted to give it a rooted look.
Also his mother, Louisa Brindle Gower
, a persistent voice continued in his mind;
a sister, Brindle G. T. Roberts, and eleven grandchildren
. Behind the office, a dozen smaller trailers sat at haphazard angles to one another. They might have been tossed there by a fractious child, along with the items of scrap all around them—discarded butane tanks, a rust-stained mattress, a collapsed sofa with a sapling growing up between two of its cushions. Morgan drove past an old woman in a man's tweed overcoat. He parked in front of a small green trailer and got out. The woman turned to look after him, brushing wisps of gray hair from her eyes. It was obvious she planned to start a conversation. Morgan would not admit she was there. He rushed toward the trailer, keeping his head ducked. His mouth felt too large. He had, he observed detachedly, all the physical symptoms of … shame; yes, that was it. How peculiar. He felt insufficiently shielded by his cap, which was trim, narrowly visored, of no particular character. He turned up the collar of his jacket before he fumbled at the door.

“Cold enough for you?” the woman called in a thin, carrying voice.

He bowed lower over the lock.

“Yoo-hoo! Mr. Meredith!”

Services will be private
.

Emily was cooking breakfast. He smelled bacon, a special Sunday treat. Josh was toddling through the living room in a pair of sodden corduroy overalls with one strap trailing. Morgan scooped him into his arms and Josh chuckled.

“Did you get the paper?” Emily asked.

He set Joshua down again. “No,” he said.

He had left it in the truck. He would dispose of it later on.

There was no reason to feel so embarrassed. Bonny was the one who ought to feel embarrassed. (For it was Bonny who had done it, he assumed. Of course it was. Wasn't it?) What a silly reaction to have! He considered himself with a remote, bemused curiosity. Even his posture seemed furtive—the way he walked the length of the trailer with as little noise as possible, stooped, head ducked, as if trying not to disturb the air. He went from the living room (one couch beneath a small, louvered window) through the narrow aisle between a table and the counter that was their kitchen. Sidling past Emily, he kissed the back of her neck. She had a ripple of bones down her nape that reminded him of the scalloped spines of some seashells.

He continued into the bedroom, with its single built-in bureau and bed. A Port-a-Crib took all the remaining space. To reach the little curtained closet in one corner, he had to clamber across the bed. He took his cap off and set it on the shelf next to Emily's suitcase. He took his jacket off and hung it on a hanger. He had bought the jacket last November at a place called Frugal Fred's. Having left his extra clothes behind when he fled Baltimore, he had found himself with nothing warm enough to get him through the winter, and he'd paid five dollars for this heavy blue jacket that must once have been part
of an Air Force uniform, although it was bland and dull now, undecorated. All the insignia seemed to have been removed, leaving empty stitches on the sleeves and across one pocket. He supposed that was some sort of regulation. They wouldn't want anyone impersonating an officer, naturally. Yes, it was only sensible. But sometimes he liked to imagine that the insignia had been
ripped
away. He pictured a scene in a field—the ranks of men standing at attention, the bugle call, the drums, Morgan stepping smartly forward, his commanding officer stripping him of his stripes in a single dramatic gesture. Whenever he thought of this, he walked straighter in his jacket and took on an impassive expression: the look of a man who had willfully, recklessly directed his life on a collision course toward ruin. However, he knew it was a jacket that no one would glance at twice. And his cap was what they called a Greek sailor cap, but not really Greek-looking, not seaworthy-looking; everybody wore them nowadays, even teenaged girls at the local high school, tilting the visors over their jumbles of curls.

He washed his hands in the tiny bathroom and returned to the kitchen. Emily was dishing out breakfast. He sat down at the table and watched her lay two strips of bacon on his plate. “Come eat, Josh,” she called.

Josh was running a tin trolley car along the edge of the couch. He brought the trolley to the table with him, swaggering along in his rocking-horse gait, studiously silent. (He was the quietest, most accepting child Morgan had ever known.) In his layers of shirts and sweaters he seemed to be having trouble bending his chunky arms. Emily picked him up and set him in his chair. “What's that?” he asked, pointing to his cup.

“It's orange juice, Josh.”

Josh took a bite from a strip of bacon, fed another bite to the front window of his trolley car.

“Did you mail my letter?” Emily asked Morgan, sitting down across from him.

“What letter?”

“My letter to Gina, Morgan.”

“Oh, yes,” Morgan said. “I took it to that box in front of the Post Office.”

“It'll reach Richmond by Tuesday, then,” Emily said.

“Well, or Wednesday.”

“If she writes me back the same day, I might get a letter on Friday.”

“Mm.”

“She hardly ever writes the same day, though.”

“No.”

“I wish she were a better letter-writer.”

He said nothing. She looked up at him.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Wrong?”

“You seem different.”

“I'm fine,” he said.

She went back to buttering her toast. Her hands were white with cold, the nails bluish. The curve of her lashes cast faint shadows on her cheeks. It struck him how unchanged she was. Year after year, while everyone around her grew older, Emily kept her young, pale, unlined face, and her light-colored eyes gave her a look of perpetual innocence. She wore the same clothes. Her hair was the same style, piled in braids on top of her head with a few stray tendrils corkscrewing at her neck to give her a hint of some secret looseness—always possible, never realized—that could stir him still.

Well, he would go to the editors. Of course he would. He'd go storming in with the paper. “See here, what's the meaning of this? Don't you people ever check your facts?
Morgan Gower, Hardware Store Manager!
Where's your sense of responsibility?
I
am Morgan Gower. Here I stand before you.”

But they would say, “Aren't you that fellow Meredith? One that works for young Durwood?”

In fact, he had no case.

2

E
mily zipped Josh into his jacket for a walk, but Morgan decided not to go with them. “Don't you feel well?” she asked him.

“I'm fine, I tell you.”

“Did you pick up those coughdrops?”

“Yes, yes, somewhere here …” He slapped his pockets and beamed at her, intending reassurance. She went on frowning. “Don't forget we have that show tonight,” she told him.

“No, I haven't forgotten.”

After they left, he watched them through the living-room window—Emily a fragile little thread of a person, Josh in his fat red jacket trudging along beside her. They were heading north, across a field, toward the scrubby pine woods that ran along the highway. The field was so lumpy and rutted that sometimes Joshua stumbled, but Emily had hold of his hand. Morgan could imagine her tight, steady grip—the steely cords in her wrist, like piano wire.

He turned away from the window a fraction of a second before the phone rang, as if he'd been expecting it. Maybe he just wouldn't answer. It was sure to be someone pushing in, someone who'd found him out: “So! I hear you died.” But, of course, no one had any way of knowing. He made himself go into the bedroom, where the phone sat on the bureau. It rang six times before he reached it. He lifted the receiver, took a breath, and said, “Hello.”

“Is that you, Sam?” a man asked.

“Yes.”

“It is?”

“Yes.”

“You don't sound like yourself.”

“I've got a cold,” Morgan said.

Morgan grinned into the mirror.

“Well, I guess you heard what happened to Lady.”

Then a strange thing happened. It felt as if the floor just skated a few feet away from him. Not that he lost his balance; he stood as firm as ever, and his head was perfectly clear. But there was some optical illusion. His surroundings appeared to glide past him. He might have been riding one of those conveyor belts that carry passengers into airport terminals. Come to think of it, he had felt this way once before in an airport near Los Angeles. He'd gone to fetch Susan—it must have been four or five years ago; she'd had some kind of crack-up over a broken love affair—and after flying all one day he'd landed but gone on flying, it felt like. Or everything had flown around him, as if he'd been traveling so long, such a distance, that a sudden stop was impossible. He blinked, and reached out for the bureau.

“Sam?” the man asked.

“I'm not Sam. Please. You have the wrong number.”

He hung up. He looked around the trailer, and found it stable again.