Authors: Jack Ketchum
The Lost (13 page)
He realized that he didn’t want to replace Lila.
So he was stuck with his job, his bar, his television and
the glove
, his long empty evenings like the one facing him. Ferlinghetti had talked about waiting for a rebirth of wonder. Schilling would have settled for a rebirth of practically anything.
He was working on it with this Pye business.
It was really all he could think to do.
He pulled into the driveway and cut the engine and stared at the house, as though trying to figure out who exactly lived there and then he went inside.
The cat sat perched on the windowsill peering in at the sleeping man and woman on the bed inside.
The man was the one who fed her.
She wished the man would wake and feed her now. Since sundown half an hour ago she had felt that familiar ache in her belly. The ache was insistent and would not let her sleep. All day long the cat had wasted her store of energy chasing birds but she wasn’t good at chasing birds and it was possible she never would be. Still the hunger and their chatter in the trees drove her to try.
She placed both front paws on the windowpane, stood on her hind legs and scratched at the glass. The woman inside moved in the dark, coughed, shifted to her side. Encouraged, the cat scratched harder. The woman had never fed her but she lay beside the man who did. The woman shifted again and then lay still and the cat sensed she was deep asleep now as the man was.
She leapt from the windowsill to the branch of the tree, dug in with her back claws and placed her front paws down along the tree trunk, dug in with those claws too and inched herself forward until she felt secure she could safely make the drop, let go and fell through the thick humid air to the dewy grass and began moving slowly, watching for movement, for something smaller than herself of which she could make a meal, stalking in the twilight.
Sally registered the sounds at the window and dreamt she was in school only ten years younger, just a little girl. Sitting at her desk watching a teacher she didn’t know and had never known, a small mousy woman writing on the blackboard. The class was quiet and well-behaved. She turned to her left and saw Jack Wolff and Larry Pierce sitting with their hands politely folded on their desks in front of them which in life they had never done. In life Jack and Larry were a pair of cutups. Class clowns. She felt disoriented, as though she didn’t belong there and sad too because her parents had simply left her in this room, just dumped her here and she knew in her heart that she was stranded, that they weren’t coming back.
The mousy little teacher had her back to the class and was still writing. Long loopy letters in an elegant hand but which, because she kept on moving back and forth in front of them, Sally couldn’t read. Cindy Wildman, the prettiest girl in the school, sat to her left. Sally looked over at Cindy and tried to smile in a friendly way, but her heart wasn’t in it. She felt close to tears. Cindy leaned over and whispered,
it doesn’t matter, she’ll be gone before you know it
, which made no sense to her but scared her somehow because if the teacher was gone then who was left to help her? And then the teacher turned away from the letters on the blackboard, standing to one side of the letters and facing the class and smiled and Sally could read the words that said
put me in the landscape
over and over and then she did start to cry because she knew that the words were meant to frighten her and as soon as she did she felt a hand on her shoulder, someone standing behind her and she turned and it was Ed. He was smiling and he gave her shoulder a tiny squeeze.
You take it easy
, he said.
You’ll be fine
.
The dream twisted and folded into another dream, this one she felt of little consequence. She was in a garden sorting through a bale of apples picking out the good ones and slept quietly from then on until the clock inside her did what it always did, said it was getting late, it was a weeknight and her parents would wonder, it was time to go. She woke and dressed in the moonlit dark and Ed continued to sleep. Before she left she kissed him on the forehead, very softly so as not to awaken him.
She remembered neither dream at all.
He was thinking about Steiner/Hanlon. Thinking that if Charlie couldn’t leave it alone after all these years then neither could he exactly, though he wasn’t going to tell Charlie that. Wondering if there was anything they’d overlooked back then, sorting it through, thinking how Charlie and he were somehow still linked at the hip in so many ways, all this was going through his mind when he pulled in and parked the pickup outside Kaltsas’ Drugstore.
So he didn’t see Bill Richmond’s big white Caddy at the curb two cars down. Not until he was halfway up the stairs and by then he was committed. He wouldn’t necessarily have avoided either Bill or June but he might have wanted to prepare himself somehow. Though how he might have done that he didn’t know.
He stepped inside and thought that Dean was overdoing it with the air-conditioning. The place felt only slightly warmer than a meat locker. He could see Bill Richmond down at the far end by the pharmaceuticals counter talking to Dean and putting his wallet back in his jacket pocket. Dean was in his hospital whites as was his habit. Bill had on a slick tan suit that, cost-wise was probably the equivalent of Ed’s entire wardrobe less the L. L. Bean hunting boots kept oiled and polished in his closet.
As he approached the counter Bill turned abruptly and almost walked into him. He laughed.
“Whoops. Sorry, Ed. Hey, how’ve you been? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
Aside from Sally he and Bill had only one thing in common and that was that they were both VFW. Though Ed hadn’t used the bar or pool table or been to a meeting all year long.
Richmond shifted the small white pharmacy bag from one hand to the other and then extended his right hand and Ed took it. Bill was always one for shaking hands upon meetings or departures. It was like he was running for town councilman and Ed sometimes wondered why he hadn’t done that already. It felt strange to touch the father’s hand when the daughter’s hand knew every inch of him. He thought that it was a good thing he wasn’t made for blushing.
“Got a little summer cold, Bill. Hard to get rid of. Otherwise, all’s well.”
“You too? Sally and June have both got colds. June got hit pretty hard with it. I hope I don’t catch the goddamn thing. A day out of work would cost me plenty.”
Nice to be reminded you’re successful, that you have money. Thanks, Bill
.
“I guess it would. Here’s hoping. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.”
Bill smiled again. Despite the frigid air he was sweating and Ed thought he could stand to lose some weight. Forget catching a cold. A heart attack would put him out of commission a whole lot longer. Richmond patted him on the shoulder.
“I sure
am
hoping and that’s a fact. Listen, Ed, I’m sorry, but I gotta run. You take care now. Dean, take care.”
He shook Ed’s hand a second time and waved at Dean behind the counter without a backward glance and walked briskly down the aisle. A man with meetings to run, deals to make, a man of importance. Ed thought,
That sure is a damn nice suit
.
And he hasn’t got a clue, praise the lord.
He ordered some Dristan and a two-dozen pack of Trojans and took a box of Vicks cough drops off the rack. If Bill had stuck around he would have had to skip the Trojans. Dean didn’t smile when he handed them over; Dean never did and Ed was glad of that.
Sally had wanted to go on the Pill a few months back, but Ed didn’t trust the Pill for health reasons or an IUD either for that matter, he’d read about them both and he was skeptical. Even if Sally wasn’t. Even though she laughed at him. He didn’t want to be the cause of harm to her. Some would say that they shouldn’t have been doing this in the first place, that he was putting her in harm’s way just by being with her, a middle-aged man and a young girl. He half agreed. He knew he was out on a limb here. But Sally had some say in that too as long as he respected her thinking on it and he did. They’d break when the time came and they’d both know when that was. In the meantime he still felt safer sticking with the Trojans.
He stood at the counter and he and Dean talked about retirement awhile because Ed was retired nearly four years now and Dean wasn’t, though he wanted to be, he wanted to move to Florida. He even had a town picked out, a place called Punta Gorda which was Spanish for Fat Point. Why anyone would want to retire to a place called Fat Point was beyond him. He pictured a town full of 300 pounders in bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses living on a diet of Big Macs, thick shakes and fries. But Dean had visited his brother there and said it was very nice.
He walked out of the store into bright morning sunlight and going down the stairs he glanced across the street. There were still two old houses there that had yet to go commercial sandwiched between a bakery and a woman’s clothing shop. One belonged to Harry Dietz, retired chief of the Fire Department and the other to an elderly widow named Betty Knott who’d been Ed’s third-grade teacher in a little six-room schoolhouse over on Bound Brook Avenue, now a professional building renting space to an assortment of doctors, dentists and attorneys. Reportedly both Betty and Chief Deitz had been offered a bundle for their property but refused to sell. He knew from Sally that at least one of the offers had come from Bill Richmond.
Betty Knott was sitting on the porch now with her old mongrel dog. Both of them fast and peacefully asleep in the shade, almost comically so, the widow leaning in her rocker with her mouth open wide and the old dog sprawled at her feet. And seeing them there made him smile and then unexpectedly saddened him with a sudden forceful clarity. It was as though he had looked behind the scene on the porch across the street into some terrible scene in the future. Because they each were all the other had in the world by way of comfort and it was possible for him to understand in that moment the cruel eventuality that was blooming there. They were both so damn
old
. He sensed a sort of fate about them and sensed too that it would descend upon them soon, that soon either the woman would lose the dog or the dog would lose the woman and they had been together since the dog was just a pup. When death came to one the other would be left alone, no familiar hand to pat the dog or cool wet nose to nuzzle the hand, and there would be no consoling either dog or woman, something fragile lost forever in some awful rending.
He looked away and wondered why this thought had come to him. If it was because of Steiner/Hanlon and Schilling or if perhaps it was his wife Evelyn he was missing or maybe even Sally, missing her already. Looking down the road. But whatever the reason he couldn’t let go of it, not getting into the pickup and starting the engine nor driving away down the sunny, familiar streets. He felt fragile himself and strangely close to tears, and that happened to him only very rarely.
He had hoped to escape the sight of death by taking early retirement from the department but death had found him on a sick bed with Evelyn as easily as it had found him with Steiner/Hanlon and now in a quieter way death had found him here.
Death was everywhere.
It was only hiding.
The girl behind the counter was a familiar face, a freshman or maybe a sophomore at Sparta High but Sally didn’t know her. The two- or three-year gap in their ages was still unbreachably wide. She must have been new working in the place, though. Slightly overweight, a pretty redhead, the zits on her chin marring what was otherwise very nice clear skin. The girl smiled and asked would there be anything else right now and put the ham on rye with mayo, lettuce and tomato and the glass of ice tea down on the counter in front of her. Looking at Sally as though she recognized her too. Sally said that was fine, thanks, and the girl smiled again and moved away.
She was actually a little jealous of the girl. If she’d known that there was an opening here she’d have grabbed it in a minute.
At lunchtime you could count on the Sugar Bowl to be jammed and today was no exception. People eating standing two deep behind those seated at the counter. You were expected to share enough of your space so that somebody else’s cold drink or coffee mug could rest a little to the left or to the right of you. Takeout business was brisk.
The food was good. And cheap. Homemade soups, stews, cakes and pies, fresh breads and pastries from Manger’s bakery and cold cuts from Paul’s Deli both right across the street. The big wide grill sizzled in plain sight so that if the short-order cook fouled up your order, broke an egg yolk that was supposed to be over easy you knew it right away. But the short-order cook was also the owner Mr. Fahner and he practically never did. She could smell eggs frying and ham and bacon and burgers and pea soup on the burner and steaming hot coffee. The mingled scents always pleased her.
