The Uninvited (31 page)

Mimi

She added the phone number at the bottom.

“What do you think?” she asked.

Jay scratched his head. “You’ve invited him over. What if he is a nutcase?”

“I like to think I can spot the nutcases,” said Mimi. “Like I know when to cross the street. I know when to curl my car keys into my fist with the meanest, sharpest one sticking out like a blade between my fingers. You know what I mean?”

The look Jay gave her wasn’t hard to read.

“Okay, so I blew it with Lazar.”

Jay read the letter again. “Do we really want this guy coming around?” he asked.

Iris looked at Mimi. “He’s right, you know. Maybe this was all a ploy to get your attention. A creepy kind of courtship.”

Mimi shook her head. “It started before I was here, remember? But I don’t think he’s dangerous. And, anyway, I’ve got my handy firearm,” she said. And she patted her mace canister in its woven holster.

So they piled into Iris’s Toyota and took off up the road, passing only two other driveways, one overgrown and clearly abandoned, before coming at last to 1436.

The driveway was steep and deeply rutted. The mailbox was rusty and sitting on a cedar pole that was leaning drunkenly toward the road. You could only catch a glimpse of the house behind a thick growth of sumac. It didn’t look like much.

“Do we go up?” Jay asked.

The others shook their heads. There was no sign of any life, no car that they could see from the road. They sat silently in the Toyota, taking it all in.

“How old was that phone book?” asked Mimi. And Jay knew what she was saying: did anyone really live here? He opened his door and stepped out. The door of the mailbox squeaked noisily as he opened it, and Mimi’s eyes darted to the crest of the driveway, expecting Cramer to appear, or M.—whoever she was. But no one came.

Jay held up the contents of the mailbox for their inspection: circulars mostly, addressed to “Occupant,” except for a bill from Hydro Energy addressed to Mavis Lee. The bill was an overdue notice.

He shoved Mimi’s letter in with the other mail. As Iris put the car in gear, Jay turned to look at Mimi sitting in the backseat. “I hope we’re doing the right thing,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I
T WAS DARK BEFORE CRAMER
made it home, so he had to find his way up the creek by feel, like a blind man with a paddle for a white cane. Bunny lay across the thwarts of the old aluminum canoe. The holes drilled into her keel had been too wide to fill up with what he’d taken with him.

More than once he thought, with a shock, he was late for work. Then he remembered he had no job right now. No job, a girl he was crazy about who hated him, and a mother who was just plain crazy. Why pretend anymore that she wasn’t? Why care? It didn’t get you anywhere. He was down to one friend in the whole world, and she was filled with holes.

There were six holes in all, and Stooley Peters had been clever. Even in the light, Cramer might not have seen the damage when he first got to the canoe, because the holes were drilled on the other side of the keel to his approach. By daylight he would have probably noticed the holes as soon as he climbed aboard, but in the dark, it was only the cold water he noticed as it crept up around his knees.

Now Bunny lay, like the carcass of a dead animal, across the old canoe. But she was not dead. He would fix her. And he would get his revenge.

Waylin Pitney was noisy when he was happy and he was noisy when he was mad, and you had to stop and listen to figure out which was which. From the bottom of the hill, Cramer could hear him and this time the man was mad. Very mad.

A few weeks ago, Cramer might have charged up that hill, his fists ready to take him on. It was the opportunity he’d been waiting for, the moment he had been preparing for. If that man so much as laid a finger on Mavis in anger, he was going to show him what he was made of. That’s what he would have done. But he wasn’t going to burst through the door fists flying right now. He’d grown up in more ways than one.

He approached the house in a wide circle, rolling his shoulders, working out the tiredness of rowing upstream with an awkward cargo, eighty pounds, dry weight—more like ninety after a night marinating in the Eden. He didn’t hear any screams. Mavis was shouting, but she sounded as if she was giving as good as she got. He’d still defend her, if it came to that. Habit was stronger than emotion. He would defend her out of habit.

Something had died in him, he realized. It was as if some nerve had been sliced clear through. He could feel his heart pumping hard, feel the fuel injection of adrenaline, but his anger toward this intruder—because that’s all Waylin was—had transformed. He realized something, suddenly, that stopped him in his tracks. It wasn’t just Waylin he hated right at this moment; it was her, too, the woman in there screeching like a banshee.

The idea made him dizzy. But when the dizziness left him, he was hit by something else. Why was he even there anymore? So he approached the house a different man than the one who had left it earlier that day.

The shouting had stopped by the time Cramer reached the house. He stood outside the screen door and peered inside. Mavis was alone, sitting at the table with her fist around a beer bottle. Cramer had heard Waylin head upstairs. He could hear him now, crashing around up there. He could see his mother wince and glance upward from time to time at a particularly loud noise, a look on her face as if she expected the ceiling to fall in. Beyond that, her expression was one of sullen rage.

She was wearing a red blouse he had never seen before, frilly and low cut. Another chunk out of the money he’d got for her. She was slumped in her chair, fuming. She had a cigarette on the go. She took a long drag on it and blew out smoke until her face disappeared. She was gone. Just like that.

Something crashed to the floor above her.

“Jesus!” She looked at the cigarette and dropped it in her beer bottle.

A door slammed, and cowboy boots strode along the hall above and came thudding down the stairs.

Waylin took a bottle from the case on the table and twisted off the top. He kicked a chair around until it was facing him and dropped into it.

“I’d love one, thanks so much,” said Mavis.

Waylin kicked the leg of the table. “What did that little ass-wipe do with it?”

Now Cramer was listening.

“
If
he took it,” said Mavis. “You sure you didn’t lose it?”

“It’s not the kind of thing you lose,” he said. “So where the hell is he?”

“Damned if I know.” But there was something about the way she said it that made Cramer prick up his ears. It seemed to have the same effect on Waylin.

“You do know,” he said.

“I don’t,” said Mavis. Her voice was slurred from drink and rough from yelling.

Waylin stared at her, and she stared back as she helped herself to another beer. “Why do I get the feeling you think this is funny?” he said. “Because it isn’t funny, Mavis. It isn’t one bit funny. It’s a gun, Mavis. You got that? An M-1911A1C.”

“Sounds like a lottery number.”

“It isn’t a lottery number, believe me.”

“No, it’s an
automatic weapon.
I got you the first three hundred times.”

Waylin chugged down his beer. “I am going to find him, Mavis. And when I do, I’m going to drown the little bastard, which is what you should have done in the first place the minute he was born.”

“Ah, shut up,” she said. But it surprised Cramer how little energy she put into it. Waylin might have been talking about taking out the garbage, the way his mother reacted.

“How ’bout I drown him for you, Mavis?” said Waylin, just to hear himself talk.

And Mavis took a long swig of her own beer and said nothing.

Then suddenly Waylin kicked out at the table so hard, a couple of empties clattered to the floor. Next thing he was on his feet and grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair. Cramer slid into the shadows around the side of the house.

“Where you going?” shouted Mavis.

“Out!” said Waylin.

The screen door flew open, and he marched across the yard toward the Taurus.

Mavis appeared at the door. “You’re in no condition to drive,” she shouted.

“Oh, yeah?” he said, turning as he walked, stumbling backward, getting his balance again, then fishing out the car keys from his pants pocket. “Well, you’re in no condition for nothing else,” he said. “So I’ll just have to find someone a bit more lively.”

“How you gonna get lucky without your automatic weapon?” she shouted. Then she started laughing, cackling like a witch.

Cramer sank to the ground and leaned against the wall as the car engine roared and the headlights came on. The lights swept the front of the house as Waylin turned out of the yard and down the drive. There was a mighty thunking sound as he hit the road, and then he was gone, his fist pressed to the horn in a final noisy display of rage.

Cramer waited, barely breathing until he heard the screen door close. Then he waited some more, sitting in the dark as the sound of the car horn disappeared into the night. He waited until there was no sound left but the buzzing in his head.

When he entered the house, his mother was cleaning up, dropping empties back in the carton in a desultory way.

She turned to look at him. “Where you been?” she said, but she didn’t sound angry, just weary.

“Out,” he said.

“Out,” she said, and chuckled. “Men,” she said. “Always out.”

On the counter Cramer found the remains of a casserole, which he picked at with a fork. There were a lot of remains; it was burnt, the contents dry as sawdust.

“You want to see something?” she said.

He turned. She was holding something shiny between her thumb and forefinger. He walked over and she handed it to him. It was a nugget of gold the size of a marble.

“It’s real,” she said. “Waylin gave it to me.”

Her voice didn’t sound tired anymore.

“Where’d he get it?”

“Where do you think?” she said, taking it back from him and holding it up to marvel at its luster. Then she bit on it. “That’s how you can tell it’s real,” she said. “You bite it.” She didn’t bother to explain how that proved anything and Cramer didn’t really care.

“He told me once the miners have to strip and get hosed down before they leave the mine each day,” said Cramer.

“Uh-huh, I know.”

“It’s so the miners don’t get to take home even any gold dust.”

“I know, I know. What’s your point, Cramer?”

“Well, the only way he could get this out of the mine is by shoving it up his ass.”

Her fist closed around the nugget and she glared at him. “That is so gross,” she said. “I really don’t know what’s happened to you.”

He turned away and picked up the case of beer, now full of empties, and carried it over to the pile by the door.

“It may be gold, but it’s not a wedding ring, Mom,” he said.

She glared at him and there was a gleam in her eye that was just plain mean. “You been seeing your girlfriend?” she said.

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Come on, Cramer, fess up.”

He stared at her. There was something disturbing in her expression, as if she wasn’t just playing with him.

“You got something to tell your mama?” she said.

Cramer shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to say to you anymore. So, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just go drown myself in the creek, which is what you should have done the moment I was born.”

Cramer waited only long enough to see it dawn on her face that he was quoting Waylin, then he turned and left.

She called to him from the door. “You were eavesdropping. That isn’t nice!”

He didn’t look back.

“And it isn’t funny, Cramer. Cramer?”

The yard light was on, but he walked right through its wide circle of illumination out past the drive shed to the lip of the hill and looked down over the creek.

“I know about
her,
Cramer,” his mother shouted. “You think I don’t know nothing, but you’re wrong.” Then she cackled again. “If you only knew,” she said.

He didn’t turn right away. When he did, she had gone back inside. He was tempted to go back and ask what she was talking about. Demand it. Shake it out of her. But he was afraid to go back, afraid that in his anger he might do something he would regret. So he stood there and dug deep inside, with what strength he had left after a day that had gone on for years, and found not one glimmering nugget of sympathy for her.