The End of the Pier (4 page)

Her little laugh sounded artificial even to her. “Just because you take everything literally . . .”

“Literal has nothing to do with it. Want some more?”

Sam was tugging the Popov bottle out of the ice, which he wasn't supposed to do, and he knew it, and she put her hand over his and shoved it back down. Maud liked to pour her own drink in a certain way and at certain times.

Holding her glass up to the lamplight, she said, “Well, you're certainly in one of your moods.”

“What're you talking about? I don't have moods.”

That was true. Even when she knew he was sad, or disturbed, he didn't show it. “You certainly do. Usually, it's when you've been going around at night checking on us.”

“Us?”

She turned a patient little smile on him. “Ever since Nancy Alonzo was murdered you've been checking up. I guess it's nice of you to do it. But it makes you moody. ‘Obsessed' is a better word.”

He just sat there smoking and not answering. When Sam didn't answer, she knew she'd struck a nerve, and pulled back. “It was pretty terrible, what happened. But it happened in Hebrides. You're not sheriff of Elton County, so you shouldn't be worrying about it.”

“It might have happened in Hebrides, but she lived in La Porte. That cuts no ice with Sedgewick, though.” Sedgewick was the sheriff over there, and there wasn't much love lost between the two men.

As Sam talked about Sedgewick and Elton County, Maud poured herself a cold martini and listened to the music.

•  •  •

From across the water the faint strains of a whole orchestral arrangement scored her thought. It was only the music, but she had long ago learned the words:

The morning found you miles away,

With still a million things to say . . .

Maud could feel her scalp prickle and tighten, the skin crawl. It was the exact same feeling that people were always using to describe fear or disgust:
“My skin just crawled.”
It was as if the thoughts had somehow got too large for the skull to contain them, a terrible feeling that traveled down her arms and broke out in gooseflesh.

She would have to practice harder at containing her thoughts. That image of her mother had slipped out from behind one of her mind's bolted doors; at least she thought she'd bolted it, but here it was, opening a crack, and her dead mother slipping out like a child told to stay in its room, and sneaking along the hall to tiptoe downstairs. And then the image became unruly, clotted with other images, unmanageable, for it was as if her mother were slyly opening other doors along the way, doors that Maud had stupidly, momentarily left unsecured. Her mother was letting out the other occupants; there was the blur of her dead father (who had died too long ago to visualize concretely); there was her Aunt Sheba, with her wry, ironic mouth given to caustic comments, who marched resolutely down the hall collecting Chad, Chad at the age of five or six—Aunt Sheba coaxing him out to come along, there was a party, let's not miss it. They were all collecting on the stairs before Maud could control them, herd them back into their locked rooms—
shove
them back behind their doors. There they were, all gathered on the stairs to sit and watch through the banisters the flamboyant party to which they had not been invited. The party that flowed from inside to outside, from the old family drawing room out onto a lawn and then across the lake.

And there was no control: her mind was crowded with old relatives, ones she hadn't thought of for ages, ones that it wasn't necessary absolutely to keep locked up—other aunts, uncles, the cousin who had died of cancer at twenty-eight, and then friends she had lost touch with. They were filling the hall, the wide staircase, peering over the mahogany banister, searching the lake as if those passing boats might ferry them across it—

Return I will

To old

Bra-zil

There on a lawn somewhere was Chad at five, at ten, at sixteen.
Go back, back inside.
She could never, of course, tell this to another living soul, because how could they understand what she meant? A psychiatrist, maybe, someone like Dr. Elizabeth Hooper, who'd been in the Rainbow that day; but who else? “Possessive,” that's what Shirl would say.
“You want to keep that kid locked up, that's all.”
Of course, Shirl would be the least sympathetic of all, since she spent so much of her time yelling at Joey to either stop playing hooky or haul ass out of the house and work. And yet Maud didn't think she was possessive—not in
that
sense. She frowned in her effort of trying to figure out just what it was: that she wanted to be able to go back and see it all over again—not like snapshots (they only caused her pain), but to have all of those stages of growing up out there, like the lines of light thrown by the lanterns across the water.

She clutched at the book of poetry in her lap as she looked across the lake—the music was louder, faster, strident with the sting of some female vocalist—and thought about the woman in the poem walking by the sea, singing. Maud had got far enough in her understanding of this poem to know that somehow the woman singing there had power over the sea. A simple mortal woman had some kind of control over it.

But the singer wasn't simple, Maud admitted to herself, despairingly. Obviously the poet meant the woman was an artist. A singer, a poet, a musician—an artist. She had “genius,” and that was the reason she had control, although Maud did not at all know just what the control was, except that it was crucial.

“Tina Turner.”

Maud jumped slightly at the sound of Sam's voice. Half her mind had been aware he had stopped talking some moments ago and had been just sitting there, quiet, drinking his beer, listening to the party across the water. “What? What?” She squinted at him.

Sam nodded toward the other side of the lake. “Tina Turner.” He yawned, patted his hand politely against his mouth, and looked down at Maud's lap. “You still trying to figure out that poem about Key West?”

It annoyed her—well,
embarrassed
her a little—that he seemed to be able to read her thoughts. Irritably, she asked, “How can you tell that's Tina Turner? You can't possibly. It's too far away.”

“Well, I can tell.”

He could not; it was just a singer and a fast, jumpy song. Hardly anyone was dancing; there was only a little clutch of tiny figures. She liked the small daubs of the gowns of the women, even though the dark, the distance, and the lantern light muted them, blurring the pinks, turning them lavender. And then she realized she could no more see such mutations than Sam could hear whose voice that was. Someone—a man, she thought—broke away from the group and walked slowly down to the dock and stood there smoking.

“It's not
about
Key West,” she said when she saw Sam fold a stick of gum into his mouth. He did this sometimes preparatory to leaving, and she did not want him to go.

“It says it is in the title. ‘The Idea of Order—' ”

She sighed hugely. “Oh, for god's sake.” She started to lecture him and thought she should change her tone if she wanted to keep
him there. Patiently, she explained. Re-explained. “It is
about
a kind of order—”

“I figured that out. It says so in the title.”

“It is
about
a person's ability to order things. In this case it's a singer making some sense out of the sea . . . No . . .” She held up her palm as if to stave off some objection Sam had clearly not been about to make—yet. “To ‘master' it.”

“Tina Turner, for example.”

She refused to speak to him now.

Diplomatically, he changed the subject.

“That cat's going belly-over off this dock in one more minute.”

“What?”
she shouted.

“Well, for Christ's sake, there's no need to scream. All I said was, that cat—”

She looked at the black cat. It was hunched down nearly half-over the edge, as if it had some serious business under there, something on the underside of the splintered wooden plank. “It's okay.” But it wasn't okay with her that now her attention had been drawn again to the cat; at least, though, its bad eye was turned away from her. “Don't you know if that cat belongs to anyone?” She knew the tone was accusatory; the implication was that he was a policeman and he should know the comings and goings of the village's animals.

“No. It's just a stray. It's not wild, though.”

Maud fingered out the olive in her glass and sucked on it. “Why isn't there a vet around here? That cat's really sick.”

“Well, there's one in Hebrides. You thinking of taking that cat to a vet?”

“The tumor's getting bigger. How can I? I don't have a car.”

“There's the Merk.”

“It doesn't run, you know that.” She knew the black Mercedes fascinated Sam. Where had Maud ever got an old Mercedes?

“Trouble could be in the transmission, the main cylinder.”

Main cylinder. What was he talking about? Maud wondered if it
was the main cylinder that was burning out or grinding down in her brain. The glass sweated in her hand and she put it down on the barrel top, closed her eyes, and listened to the water slapping out against the pilings.

Sam went on talking about someone on Route 12 who was a transmission specialist, named Paul. A genius at it. “And blind as a bat,” Sam said, with a little, wondering shake of his head.

Maud turned her gaze from the dancers over there, who seemed to be drooping against one another like flowers. She knew there were blind musicians but not blind transmission specialists.

“He's got the touch. It's all in the fingers, you think about it.” Sam ran his thumb over the tips of his fingers, back and forth, eyes shut, as if he were feeling some delicate mechanism. “You know, if you've got no use for that car, give it to Chad. This is his last year; by summer Paul could have that car—” He stopped.

“Last year.”
It was an implicit, unspoken agreement between them that Chad's last year in college was not to be talked of as such.

Now Sam was making as much noise as he could crumpling his can of Coors, and talking so fast about cars in general he might have been the auctioneer at the annual police auction of repos, trying to drown out what lingering vibration there might be from that phrase as if it were a plucked violin string. Chad was a favorite, a favored topic of conversation, and so was his time at the university; but it was to be talked about as if it were never-ending, a thread woven in and out of all of the other talk, drawing it together, yet never cut. Bad enough in itself he was away; that this might be more than a mere caprice on his part or Maud's part or Fate's part was not to be looked at. That there might indeed be some final term was not to be spoken of in any concrete sense. Not, for lord's sake, in the sense that a present, a
gift,
would be given to immortalize the occasion of Chad's final departure.

“I saw a nice little Datsun that I think you could get cheap.”

“I don't want another car. What would I do with a car?”

Sam took a mouthful of beer, drew in on his cigarette, was thoughtful. “You could get out and around more. Go places.”

“Oh, for Pete's sake.” She hated it when someone started talking about her as if she were an invalid, someone like Ada Chowder, who lived in the Hebrides Nursing Home and was only released to visit her son and daughter-in-law every third Sunday. It wasn't like Sam to say something so stupid. “You could take it,” she said, feeling vengeful.

“What? The Datsun? I've got—”

“No, damn it. The cat. You could take it to Hebrides.”

Sam made a tiny, gurgling noise in his throat, the sound of someone who's choking a little on the craziness of a notion. “Don't I have enough to do without carting cats around?” His laugh was deprecating. “Besides, Sims would really like that, wouldn't he? Me using the car to take a cat to Hebrides?”

Mayor Sims spent most of his time in the Half Moon Bar and couldn't care less, but she knew Sam was feeling defensive and in his pause to take several more sips of beer would come up with at least four other reasons why he couldn't take the cat.

“It'd give Donny a laugh, too, that's for sure.” Sam caved in his empty beer can, put it in the basket.

“So what. He's only a deputy. You're the loot.”

As he was shaking the ice shavings from his next can, Sam looked up, squinting at her. “The what?”

“The loot. That's the word New York cops use for ‘lieutenant.' Or at least in books.” When she saw Sam's baffled look, she sighed. “I
mean
the boss. The highest-ranking cop in La Porte.”

•  •  •

It was the way she looked at the fact of departure; she couldn't help herself. Her scalp prickled; again the skin tightened and she looked stony-faced up at the sky while Sam talked on about cars to fill in the void. Up there was the night sky, as black as macadam, and the hard, unfiltered light of the stars. She felt she was trying to bear its weight to keep it from crashing down around them.

She was supposed to be proud, Shirl kept saying, when pride had nothing to do with it, had no place in any lexicon of what was happening, was a word you could only attach to a Norman Rockwell painting. He must have done one of a boy in a mortarboard between Mom and Pop, all of them beaming away.

The stars looked hammered in place up there, and her glass grew warm in her hand. She had felt something similar when Chad had finished high school. That, she thought, had been bad enough, the end of his living at home. But there were vacations and there was dependence. She'd hear other women saying
“Whew! Time I had a rest from all that”
and wondered to what alien race of mothers she belonged.