The Long Lavender Look (13 page)

"That would be just fine, Betsy."

So she started the cassette and adjusted the volume. She came smiling back with a gin and ice for me in a giant crystal glass tinted green, with grapes and grapevines etched into it, placed it on a cork coaster on the table beside the tilt chair. The cork coaster had small bright fish painted on it. The paper napkin was pink, imprinted with BETSY in red diagonally across a scalloped corner. Beside the drink she put a little blue pottery rowboat full of salted mixed nuts.

"There!" she said above the music of Mr. Bonfa, and went off to get rid of the occupational odor of burning meat, leaving me in my fabulously comfortable chair, next to a drink that would tranquilize a musk ox, semi-recumbent in a static forest of bric-a-brac, listening to Maria Toledo breathe Portuguese love words at me in reasonably good stereo.

A compulsive strangler would have damned few tactical problems. She had taken my word that Lennie Sibelius was my attorney. She took my word that my semi-arrest was due to bad luck rather than guilt. She went on instinct, and trusted the stranger. But a strangler can look like me.

Or thee. The guest could tiptoe in and clamp the sick hand on the soapy throat, and in the moments left to her she could remember an entirely different sequence of motion pictures.

Death itself would not be real because it would look like Alfred Hitchcock.

In fifteen minutes she reappeared in the doorway. "Look at me!" she wailed. "Will you just look at me!"

She wore a floor-length terry robe dyed in a big bold psychedelic pattern of red, orange, pink, and lemon. She held it closed, one hand at her throat, the other at her waist. Her hair was sopping wet, pasted flat to the delicate shape of the skull.

"I am so dang stupid about mechanical things," she complained.

"What happened?"

"I got out of the shower and bent over and turned it so the water comes out of the faucets, and then I was going to close the drain for a minute, to sort of rinse the tub, and I hit the shower thing, dammit. I didn't want to get my hair wet. It's very dense and very fine and it takes like forever to dry. I'm terribly sorry, dear. But I can't go out like this, really. Would you mind terribly? We could talk here, couldn't we? And there really aren't that many nice places to go at this time of night. What time is it? My goodness, it's after eleven-thirty already! I had no idea."

"I was going to suggest a rain check. Maybe that isn't the right expression."

"Is your drink all right? Goodness, you've hardly touched the surface. Are you sure you don't mind if we just stay in? At least it isn't going to give me any big decisions about what to wear.

Back in a jiffy dear."

She went away. The music stopped. I went over and flipped the cassette and cut the volume back by half, and threaded my way back to the leathery refuge. She was not, I decided, devious enough to shove her hair under the water and go into an act. Nor, having been asked out, could
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she step out of her own obligatory role and say it would be cozier if we stayed in. Doubtless it had happened just as she described it. But the mistake, though deliberate, was on a subconscious and inaccessible level. It was all part and parcel of the meet-cute. The entry in the locked diary-and it would be inconceivable for her not to keep one-would say, "Actually, probably nothing at all would ever have happened between us if I hadn't been so stupid and soaked my hair that way. Then again, maybe it would have happened anyway, but not so soon, not on the very first night I met him. There was something inevitable about Travis and me, and I guess somehow I sensed it from the very first minute."

She came out in about a jiffy and a half. She had wound a coral-colored towel around her wet hair and tucked it in place. Instead of the mini-brief, leggedy outfit I anticipated, she wore an ivory white corduroy jump suit, with a kitchy arrangement of wide gold zippers and small gold padlocks on the four pockets, a gold chain around the waist, and a concealed zipper from larynx to crotch. After she had moved through the room a couple of times, straightening and patting, I found myself reacting to the outfit, and decided that, given her figure, it was more provocative than had she worn what I expected.

She took my drink away and "freshened" it, and made herself another tall pale Scotch. She sat on a blue nubbly couch a yard from my leather lair, pulled her long legs up, and said, "I guess I'm a terrible party pooper, Travis, but I'm just as happy not to go out. I guess my little nest is really why I don't leave this town. When I'm here, I'm not really in Cypress City. I could be anywhere, I guess. Because if I were anyplace else, I'd build another nest like this one, with all my own things around me. I'm kind of ... of ... an inward sort of person. I don't really pay a lot of attention to what goes on ... out there. So I don't know if I can tell you the sort of things you want to know, actually."

I started her off by telling her I thought Sheriff Norman Hyzer a strange one. So she told me his tragic life story, and how everybody understands why he is so withdrawn and cold and precise.

But a fair man, really. Very fair. And they say he is real up-to-date with all the gadgets and advances in police work. He lives for his work and they say he's got it now so that the job pays so little money, really, that nobody else tries to get elected. He puts all the money into the department, into pay for the deputies, and patrol cars and radios and all that.

"Well, I know some Baithers, because there are a lot of them around the south county, dear.

There was one rotten Baither boy in junior high with me. He got killed in Vietnam years ago. His name was Forney Baither. I don't know what relation he was to Frank Baither. But they were the same kind, I guess. Forney got a choice of going to state prison or enlisting. I'd say that a dead Baither isn't much of a loss to anybody, and I guess nearly everybody would agree with that."

I could feel a little Bengal buzz. She wasn't going to give me anything useful unless I found the right door and blew the hinges off. I looked at her blurred image through green glass.

"Penny for your thoughts?" she said.

"I guess I was thinking about the Great Sheriff, the tragic figure, the miracle of efficiency and public service. Why would he keep an animal on his payroll?"

"What do you mean?"

"A brutal, sadistic, degenerate stud animal like Lew Arnstead?"

She put her fingers to her throat. Her mouth worked and her eyes went wide. "Lew? But he's just

. . ."

"Just the kindly officer of the law who put my gentle friend of many years in the hospital for no reason at all, and would have killed him with his hands if Billy Cable hadn't stopped him."

"That doesn't sound like ..."

"He's suspended and facing charges, and I hope Hyzer makes sure he's sent away for a long long time. I'd like to get to him first, for about one full minute."

"But he isn't . . ."

"Isn't such a rotten kid after all? Come on, Betsy! I've been checking him out ... while I was looking for him. He's been running up a big score in the Cypress County female population.

Romping them and roughing them up, and entertaining his buddies with his bare-ass Polaroid souvenirs."

Her eyes went wide-blind, looking at me and through me as she added it up, her long throat working as she swallowed again and again. The cassette had come to the end. There was no automatic turnoff. There was a small humming, grinding sound as the tape drive kept working.

This was her sweet nest, all bric-a-brac and make-believe. A talented lady once defined poetry as a make-believe garden containing a real toad. So I had put the toad in Betsy's garden.

She made a lost, hollow, plaintive cry, sprang to her feet, and ran for shelter. Miraculously, in her pell-mell dash for her bathroom, she did not smash a thing. The door banged. I heard distant kitten-sounds. I got up and ejected the tape and put a new one on.

You are a dandy fellow, T. McGee. All the lonely, wasted, wistful ones of the world have some set of illusions which sustains them, which builds a warm shelter in the wasteland of the heart. It does them no good to see themselves as they really are, once you kick the shelter down. This one was easy bed-game for any traveling man who wanted to indulge her fantasies by playing the role of sentimental romanticism, with a little spice of soap opera drama.

So, while you are digging up whatever might be useful out of the little ruin you have created, at least have the grace to try to put the make-believe garden back in order. If you get the chance.

First step. Go to bathroom door. Knock. "Betsy? Betsy, dear? Are you all right?"

Blurred and miserable answer. Something about being out in a minute. Fix a drink.

Fixed two. They looked the same as before. But hers was real and mine was tap water.

She came out at last, walking sad, shoulders slumping and face puffy, saying something about being sorry, terribly sorry.

Moved over to the couch. Sat beside her. Took her hand. She tried to pull it away, then let it rest in mine. Her eyes met mine, then slid away.

"Betsy, may I make some very personal remarks?" Shrugged, and nodded. "I think you are a fine, generous, warm-hearted woman. People are going to take advantage of those qualities sometimes. But you shouldn't feel bad, really. When ... a human being never takes any emotional risks, then she never gets hurt. But she isn't really alive, either, is she?"

"I ... don't know. I wish I was dead."

"When I opened my big mouth, honey I had no idea that you could have been involved with Lew Arnstead."

"I wouldn't have been. But he ... but he was in trouble and he felt so lost and miserable."

"Why don't you tell me about it? That might help."

"I don't want to."

"I think it would be the best thing to do."

"Well ... the background of it ... and it took him a long time to trust me enough to tell me ... he'd always had girls, before he went in the service and while he was away and after he came back.

And he fell in love with Clara Willoughbee. Really in love. And I told him the trouble was probably some kind of guilt about all the other girls, and feeling unworthy or something. But after they had plans to get married and everything, he couldn't do it with her. He'd want her terribly, and then it would just get ... he couldn't do anything."

She became more animated and dramatic as she got into the story. He and the Willoughbee girl had broken up. He had tried going back to prior girl friends, but he was still impotent. And one night, off duty, he had gotten drunk at the Lodge, too drunk to drive. She drove him around in the cold night air in her little car. He had cried and cried and said he was going to kill himself.

He passed out and he was too heavy for her to manage, so she had to leave him in her carport asleep in her car. In the morning he was gone. He came back to find out what he had told her.

Then he would stop by, just to talk to her. Finally he told her what was wrong. That was in October of last year.

"I have ... a kind of condition," she said. "It's a sluggish thyroid gland, and that gives me low blood pressure, and makes me feel kind of listless and depressed. I used to have to take thyroid
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extract, but it made me too jittery sometimes, and made my hands ice cold and sweaty. So a couple of years ago Doctor Grinner gave me a renewable prescription for something called an energizer. I take one every morning of my life. I noticed that sometimes if I get mixed up and take a second one on account of forgetting I took the first one, it makes me feel ... well, terribly sexy. I might as well say it right out. Anyway ... I told Lew how they made me feel, and he came over one Sunday afternoon and I gave him two of them, and about an hour later he thought he could. And so.... You understand I was helping him. He was so terribly depressed. Well, it worked. He was so happy and laughing and all. And so grateful to me. And we kept making love after that, and fell in love with each other."

"He kept taking your pills?"

"Oh no. He didn't have to, not after the very first time. It was all in his mind, actually. You know. Guilt and fear."

"Then you broke up? Why?"

Her eyes narrowed. "We were having a little bit of a quarrel. It wasn't serious at all. Then he slapped me, much too hard. And then he kept right on slapping and hitting me until he knocked me unconscious. I woke up right over there on that little white rug, and he was gone. I was all cut inside my mouth and my face was terrible. The next morning I was sore in a hundred places, and I could hardly get out of bed. I was off work for four days. I reported him, then withdrew the complaint. I told them I fell off a ladder, hanging a picture. And I had to wear dark glasses for a week until my black eyes didn't show anymore."

"How did he act when he was beating you up?"

"He didn't seem mad at me or anything. I was screaming and begging and trying to get away from him, but he didn't hear me, sort of. He looked ... calm. Sometimes I have bad dreams about it."

"And you've never seen him again?"

"On the street and in the dining room. But not like before. Not that way. I wouldn't! He could come begging and I wouldn't ever let him touch me. I wrote him never to come here."

"Are you in his Polaroid collection?"

"Of course not!" Too emphatic. Quick sidelong glance to see if I believed her.

"He could have tricked you somehow."

"Wall ... one Sunday afternoon, we had a lot of bloody Marys and we got kind of wild and silly and he had that camera and got it out of his car. They use it for accident investigations, and I sort of remember him taking pictures of me out in the back in Raoul's yard. But I tore them up."

She was frowningly thoughtful. "At least I think I tore them all up. He took lots and lots. I certainly wouldn't willingly let Lew or anybody walk away with ... pictures of me like that in his pocket, would I?"

"Of course not!"

She looked grateful for my indignant emphasis. She took her tall drink down several inches. She smiled sadly. "Why anybody should want nude pictures of me is something else again. I'm built kind of weird, practically enormous up here and skinny everywhere else, like I'm thirty-nine--twenty-four--thirty-two. Well, now you know what kind of an idiot I can be, dear."