The Man Without a Face (3 page)

CHAPTER 2

I mulled over Meg’s suggestion the rest of the day, mostly fooling around the pier and the harbor.

“No studying today?’’ Gloria asked, as I headed towards the porch door after breakfast instead of upstairs.

“I’m taking a day off.’’ What business was it of hers?

“You’re that far ahead?” Her expression reminded me of Moxie’s when he’s bird-watching.

“Leave him alone, Gloria,” Mother said from the stove where she was turning bacon over in the skillet.

I waited, standing at the door, for the hooker. It’s a running bet with myself. When Mother comes out on my side it usually means something I don’t like is on the way. It came.

“Charles, you know I don’t like that filthy wild cat in your room and on your bed at night. He smells up the whole house.”

How did she know?

Raging, I looked at Meg. But without even looking up from spooning her heaping bowl of cereal she was shaking her head. And I knew that, bratty as she sometimes is, Meg wouldn’t nark on me.

But there sat Gloria, picking at her scrambled egg like she was the heroine of that moronic story about a princess and a pea that Mother used to read to us when we were both small. I think Gloria got her permanent self-image from that female.

“Thanks,” I said, looking right at her.

“Does it occur to you,” she said languidly, “that your feline friend is crawling with parasites? You can practically *se them keeping house in his fur.”

Since Moxie’s tail balloons out and his back arches every time he sees Gloria, I don’t think it’s his parasites that bug her (if you’ll excuse the pun).

“Yes, but he has such good taste in people,” I said, -rather pleased with myself for once. “Besides, I thought · 3u were big on wildlife and ecology—or was that just until Steve decided he could live without you?”

Gloria’s face went psychedelic pink. “You rat. You wait. Mother—”

But I was out the porch door and down the steps. That kind of conversation had been going on almost as far back is I could remember and I wanted out.

There weren’t too many kids of my age around this summer. Some from last year had gone off to camp or another summer place, and my best friend, Joey Rodman, who also goes to my school in New York, was still in Europe with his parents where they were force-feeding him culture in the hope of boosting his IQ. That’s what drew us together: IQ. And, if anything, his case is even worse than mine, because, as he says, if you’re Jewish with a ho-hum IQ, man, you’re in real trouble. The family looks on it as a disgrace second only to converting to Christianity. But Joey wasn’t here now when I needed him, so after exchanging a few insults with a couple of kids bailing out a dinghy, I walked along the harbor skipping stones and thinking about what Meg said.

After several dreary hours relieved only by four hot dogs, a hamburger, and an occasional ice cream cone, bought whenever I circled back to the village, I came to see that it was all summed up in the question: What’s the alternative?

And the alternative was living for the next three or four years in a five-room apartment in New York, with my snotty older sister putting me down every time she sees me, having to walk through a forest of wet stockings and underwear every time I want to take a shower, and trying to find my toothbrush in a jungle of false eyelashes, hair pieces, makeup glop, and I don’t know what all. And if I complained, Mother would take Gloria’s side. There’s no dignity in living crashed in a small pad with a bunch of women. So, wondering how it felt to be chomped on by a man-hating dog, I went off to look for Justin McLeod.

It was a fairly long walk and uphill most of the way. Between thoughts of The Grouch and his dog the butterflies in my stomach were threatening to become bats, so to keep my mind occupied I tried to remember everything I had ever heard about Justin McLeod. It wasn’t difficult. The answer was all but zilch. Totted up, the items amounted to:

He had come to live in the house on the cliff about twelve years ago. Occasionally he closed the house and went away. But not often.

He lived there alone with his carnivorous dog, which meant that nobody who had dredged up some excuse or other to call on him and poke around had gotten much beyond the gate. There was a sort of P.S. to this, that the dog had been known to devour small children, but I dismissed that as unlikely. The whole thought about the dog was depressing me, so I went on to

Despite all the really interesting theories as to how he got his mutilation and his past in general, the only reliable evidence of professional activity was that he received letters and parcels from some publishing house in New York. Some of the letters had windows in them and looked as though they might be checks. (I'm not sure how this was known. The postmistress is a glacial female who seems to view her job as a Vocation. She looks as though she wished hot pincers could be applied to her fingernails by Communist agents so she could heroically refuse to tattle about who gets what mail in the village. Despite this, somebody had :talked, and there was a fairly well accepted idea that, whatever else he might have been, McLeod was a writer.)

The trouble with item 3 is that no one had ever seen his name on a book. This gave rise to the hypothesis (if you’ll excuse one of Gloria’s show-off words) that

He writes pornography under a pseudonym.

The moment this theory took hold, everybody—that is, all the young people—descended on our one bookstore and, when that proved to be a bust, on the store in the nearest town on the mainland, to buy up all the porno and go through it for what the sleuth novels call internal evidence. But all they found was the usual dreary run of reprint paperbacks. Not one real hard-core porno among them. But then as Joey pointed out (his father’s in publishing), you could hardly expect any, this being a very backward and uptight part of the country.

All these cogitations got me nowhere except, physically, where I was going.

McLeod’s house is on top of a cliff, several miles north of the harbor, and you have to go around the long way to get to his gate, the only opening in a stone wall built by some people-hating New Englander of the past. On the other side of the gate you can see bunches of pines and a path winding through them. The house is hidden from the road and the whole thing is pretty bleak. There was no sign saying “Beware of the Dog.” Still, I loitered there for a few minutes, and by doing so saved myself (I thought) a lot of trouble. Because I heard the sound of an engine and round the path came McLeod’s venerable but still rather handsome foreign car. Stopping, he got out, and I saw he was going to open the gate. I could have kicked myself then for failing to make a good impression by springing to attention and doing it for him. But I didn’t think fast enough (as usual). He’s a big man and he covered the few feet to the gate before the idea clicked. He stared at me over the gate as he unlatched it, and it was like a cold wind coming at me. “What do you want?” were the words he said. His voice said Keep away from me.

Everything I had been planning to say, a kind of savvyI introduction to my problem, went out of my head. For one thing, there was his face, closer than I had seen it before. And it was pretty unnerving. Glazed raw beef all over most of one side and flowing across his nose to the other. I just stared, then pulled my gaze off his face as though my eyes were suction cups, looked down, sideways, above, anywhere but at him, shuffled my feet like a rube, and stammered, “I—I h-heard you were a t-teacher—once.”

Silence. “So?”

Gazing at the nearest pine I mumbled, “I was wondering if you could c-coach me. I n-need to pass an entrance exam.”

“No. Certainly not.”

And he got back in the car and drove through the gate.

After he had gone I realized how I had really loused it up. To tell you the truth, I could have cried. I leaned with my elbows on the stone wall for a while. I couldn’t go back to the house. I just couldn’t. After a while I sat down with my back against the wall. Why did I always do things the *Tong way? Why did nothing ever come out right?

I knew it was getting colder and darker. I was facing east and the sky was turning charcoal gray. The wind whistled and whispered through the pines. I had just a loose sweatshirt on and jeans, and I was beginning to realize the grass wasn’t all that dry. But I couldn’t make myself move. It would be dinner before too long. I hadn’t been back to the house all day and if I didn’t show at dinnertime I’d have :o go through everything I hated most:

“How could you be so inconsiderate?”

“How can you be so irresponsible?”

Or, the real joker in the pack, “The truth is, Chuck, you just don’t care about anybody but yourself—you don’t love me.” Followed by Mother in tears. Followed by me wishing I were dead.

It finally turned dark, but I still couldn’t move. I pulled my knees up and rested my head on them. Poor old third-rate St. Matthew’s seemed like a vanished golden dream.

then, inside of me, I just quit. Turned everything off. Nothing mattered. Periodically this happens to me. Sooner or later I snap out of it, or something snaps me back, but for a while I’m not there, if you know what I mean, though I guess if it hasn’t happened to you you don’t. But it is w hat has made all five school analysts rush around trying to be helpful from time to time. When I finally come out of it and there they are, still making noises and jumping up and down, I usually think it’s pretty funny. But until I do, it's like everything is going on in another galaxy and anyway, what’s the point?

I raised my head to see two headlights focused on the gate. I hadn’t even heard the engine, but McLeod and his

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car were back. I watched while he pulled the gate-bars back, but instead of getting into the car he came towards me.

“Why haven’t you gone home?’’ he asked in that knifey voice.

What could I say? My mind was absolutely blank. So I said nothing and sat there like a dummy.

“Get up!”

I got up, but I had been sitting so long I half stumbled. Wherever my jeans had touched the grass they were wet. The night wind was cold, as it always is up around here. I was cold inside and out and I knew I had to get home and into a hot bath if I didn’t want to get one of the chills this area is famous for.

“Where do you live?”

“Th-the other s-side of the h-h-harbor. ” It wasn’t a stammer this time. My teeth were chattering.

“Do you know you’ve been here for nearly four hours? What have you been doing?”

When I didn’t answer he took my arm in a punishing grip and pushed me towards the car. “Get in.”

Instead of turning around and taking me back to the Island, he drove through the gate and up the path, not stopping to close it again.

Sure enough, the Hound of the Baskervilles came out to greet us baying as though he could hardly wait for his dinner: me.

“All right, Mickey. Shut up!”

Mickey. Like calling a Bengal tiger Cuddles.

“Get out,” McLeod said, leaning across me and pushing my door open.

When there is absolutely no alternative. I can be quite brave, and with McLeod blocking one exit and Sudden

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Death shoving his great jaw through my window, what choice did I have?

“Go on,” McLeod said. “He won’t hurt you. Not as long as you’re with me.”

I got out. Mickey reared. His doomsday voice bayed again. I closed my eyes.

“Sit!” McLeod said.

I opened my eyes. Mickey was sitting on his haunches, his head on a level with my shoulders, his tongue hanging out like a chopping block.

“Are you coming?” McLeod said, standing at the open front door.

A long time afterwards Mother or someone asked me what the house was like inside. No one had ever been there—at least not within memory. All anyone knew was that it had belonged in one family for quite some time. But no one living now in the village had ever been up there. I don’t know what they expected. Dracula’s lair? Cobwebs from the ceiling?

Anyway, I wasn’t in much of a state to notice anything that night.

“Go straight ahead through that door at the end of the hall,” he said, when I stumbled over the threshold. “The light’s on. I’ll be there in a minute.”

The door led into a smaller hall and then into a kitchen. It was a big room with a stone floor and low ceiling. An old-fashioned lamp, giving out a yellow light, hung from a rafter. There was a sink along one side beneath a window, a big table in the middle, and a chair. Along the other side was what Mother would call an old-fashioned iron range and open grate, and from it came a delicious heat. I backed

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up to it and was all but sliding my buttocks across the warm top when the door burst open and the dog loped in. Seeing me, he stopped. A bass growl started in the huge throat. I stood rigid. McLeod followed, holding a glass with some golden liquid. “Quiet,” he said to Mickey. To me he said, “Drink this,” and handed the glass to me.

I did, and it burned all the way down.

“Now go through that door and up the stairs and into the bathroom at the top of the staircase. I’ve drawn some hot water. Get in and stay in long enough to get warm. Then get out, dry off, and put on the clothes you find there. They’ll be big but they’ll have to do. Then come back down again. Now move!”

I didn’t argue, whether because I had been softened up by the drink or because I was too chilled or because of something in his voice.

I was down again in about twenty minutes, warm, dry, and rather drowsy. The dark blue sweater I had on was like a tent. The trousers were folded halfway up to the knee and I had to use the belt he’d left out, but he must be leaner than I thought because they weren’t that loose. I was carrying my own sodden garments.

He was standing staring out the window above the sink to the sea beyond and below when I came back in, his profile to me. In the half light from the lantern and from that side his disfigurement wasn’t that visible. Whatever had happened to him had not touched the bones of his face, which were good, with the nose slightly aquiline, the forehead high and the jaw firm. Then he turned and became Quasimodo again. It wasn’t just the awful red. The scars were here and there gathered or pitted like a relief map.