Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (5 page)

‘
Hakamundo!
’ said the man, with satisfaction.

Feely said nothing. He
was
scared, but not in the same way that Bruno scared him, after a bottle-and-a-half of tequila. One minute Bruno was laughing and cracking jokes and telling you what great buddies you were. The next he was screaming in fury and smashing the dinner plates.

The fear that Feely felt in this car was much more abstract. It was like a dream, as if he wasn’t really sitting here at all. It wasn’t the fear of pain; but the fear of not being there any more, of the world going on without him.

‘You eaten?’ the man asked him.

‘I had a cheeseburger. They gave me beans with it but I have a disrelish for beans.’

‘They gave you
beans
with it, hunh?’ By the dim green light from the instrument panel, Feely could see that the man wasn’t as old as his voice. Late thirties, maybe. He seemed to be fit and well-built, although he was wearing a thick sheepskin coat and so it wasn’t easy to tell. His hair was cut short, almost military, and a few silver hairs sparkled around his temples. His face was round, although his nose was sharp and triangular, like the pointer on a sundial. Feely knew that the pointer on a sundial was called a gnomon.

There was very little in the car to tell Feely what kind of a man he was. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s tucked neatly into the armrest niche, beside his seat. An open ashtray crowded with cigarette butts, most of them less than a quarter smoked, as if he kept lighting them and crushing them out after two or three puffs. A photograph of two small children on a swing-set, stuck to the glove-box with yellowing Scotch tape.

An empty Mr Pibb bottle, which kept rolling around the foot-well.

Feely noticed that the man wore a wedding band and a heavy gold chain on his wrist, but it was obvious that he wasn’t wealthy. The Caprice was more than fifteen years old, before they brought in the curvier 1990 model. It smelled of pine air-freshener and something in the bodywork kept knocking, sometimes loud and sometimes soft, like a nagging reminder that everything gets older, and everything wears out.

All the same, there was something about the man that Feely instinctively liked. In spite of the reckless way that he was driving, Feely felt that he was the kind of man who wouldn’t lie to you, and would never let you down. If he promised to show up, he would show up, even if he didn’t really feel like it. And he wouldn’t suddenly go berserk, and tip over the supper table with everybody’s food on it, and punch you on the bridge of the nose with his signet ring.

‘I didn’t personally eat yet,’ the man said, as they sped past the sign that said Cornwall Bridge. They were deep in the Litchfield Hills now, and on his right, Feely could just make out the dark serrated tree-line that followed the course of the Housatonic River. He thought it looked like the forest in fairy stories, where wolves lived.

The man continued, ‘It didn’t occur to me that I was going to be hungry, you know, but I am. I could eat a horse. I could eat two horses, and a pig, and a side-order of ducks. I guess the adrenaline’s worn off.’

Feely still wanted to make sure that the man understood about the beans. ‘My brother was always eating beans, before he died. That’s why I disrelish beans.’

‘Sure. I understand. The funniest things can put you off certain food, don’t you think? I can’t eat corned beef. I was eating some corned beef once and I found a human ear in it. Well, it probably wasn’t a human ear but it looked like a human ear. I mean I had it in my mouth and it was all squeaky and gristly like a human ear.’

Feely nodded. ‘In the diner, the waitress kept cajoling me to eat these beans. I think she was cajoling me intentionally, you know, to make me deny my brother. Like Peter denied Our Lord.’

‘She kept cajoling you, huh? What a Jezebel.’

They drove in silence for another ten minutes. The man looked over at Feely from time to time but he didn’t say anything until they passed through West Cornwall. Then he suddenly said, ‘What do you think? Do you think there’s any escape?’

‘I don’t know what you mean, sir. Escape from what?’

‘
Escape
, that’s all. Or do we
have
to wake up every morning, and finish what we started the day before?’

‘Oh, I think there’s escape, very much,’ said Feely. ‘I think that fate is always showing us ways to unburden ourselves of our problems and begin a refreshed existence.’ Just at this moment, he was supremely confident about it. After all, he still had $21.76, didn’t he? And he was still heading north.

‘You really believe that?’ the man asked him.

‘I think I have achieved it myself. Or at least, I am on the verge of achieving it.’

The man sniffed in one nostril. ‘What are you, Puerto Rican? Dominican?’

‘Cuban. My grandparents came from Ciego de Avila.’

‘Cuban, hunh? You don’t come across too many Cubans in Connecticut. Cuban, how about that. What should I call you?’

‘I don’t know, whatever you choose.’

‘You don’t have to tell me your real name, but I can’t go on calling you “you,” can I?’

‘Well, it’s Fidelio Valoy Amado Valentin Valdes.’

‘Jesus.’

‘No, sir, my brother was called Jesus. For convenience most people abbreviate my name to Feely.’

The man shook Feely’s hand. ‘Good to know you, Feely. My name’s Robert.’

‘It’s very gratifying to know you, sir,’ said Feely. ‘I want to reiterate my appreciation that you stopped for me. I realize that my appearance must be disreputable. I left New York with some expedition.’

‘Oh, yeah? What expedition was that?’

‘By expedition I mean speed.’

‘Oh. I thought you meant Exiled Cubans in Search of Santa’s Workshop, something like that. I’m sorry, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m a little drunk.’

The car slewed again, and its nearside wheel banged into a pothole.

‘Shit,’ said Robert. ‘This damned road’s all over the place. You’d think they’d have the freaking intelligence to build it straight.’

‘Maybe we should stop someplace,’ Feely suggested.

‘Stop? We have miles to go before we sleep, my good fellow. Miles to go and very necessary things to do.’

‘Maybe if we stopped for a while—well, maybe the snow would ease off.’

‘Ah, yes, but if we stopped for a while, then I’d sober up, and I always drive better when I’ve been drinking. Especially in crap like this.’

He took the next left-hand bend on the wrong side of the road, and without warning there was a truck coming straight toward them, with about a million candlewatt of headlights blazing and its klaxon blaring in nine different keys of terror.

Robert twisted the wheel and the Chevrolet slewed sideways, clipping the truck’s offside fender. It spun around and around, so that Feely saw a blurred carousel of snow-lights-darkness until
wham
they collided backward with a tree beside the road.

The engine stopped. They sat in silence while the snow softly settled on the windshield. At last, Robert turned to Feely and said, ‘Did I ask you before if you were scared?’

‘Yes, sir, you did.’

‘What did you say? I’m not sure that I remember.’

‘I said I wasn’t.’

Robert tried the ignition key and the Chevrolet’s engine whistled into life. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Because God hasn’t finished punishing me yet, and until He does, He’s going to keep me good and safe. You want to lead a charmed life, kid, you stick with me.’

He sat nodding for a while, agreeing with himself. Then he said, ‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Feely.’

‘Feely,’ Robert repeated. He switched on the interior light and fumbled in his coat pocket. Eventually he produced a business card. It said,
Transparent Rulers Inc. Robert
E. Touche
,
Divisional Sales Director.

‘See that?’ he said, leaning over and breathing whiskey into Feely’s face. ‘Touche, pronounced “toosh.” But a whole lot of my customers get it wrong, you know, and they pronounce it “touchy.”’

‘Oh, yes?’ said Feely. He wondered if he ought to get out of the car and try walking. Compared to being a passenger in Robert’s car, falling into a snowdrift and dying of hypothermia seemed positively alluring.

‘Don’t you get it?’ Robert persisted. ‘That’s
fate
. That is one hundred and ten percent
fate
. What are the chances of two people meeting in the middle of a blizzard in Connecticut, one called Feely and the other called Touchy?’

Feely leaned away from Robert’s breath, but tried not to do it too obviously, in case Robert was offended. ‘Slender,’ he said.

Robert stared at him as if he had never seen him before. Then he said, ‘
What?
’

‘You asked me what are the chances, and I said slender.’

‘Slender.
Slender
.’ He repeated it several times, pronouncing it ‘
sur
-lender.’ Then he turned back to Feely and said, ‘Are you sure you’re from Cuba? For a Cuban, you know, you talk almost perfect Martian.’

 

S
issy promised Trevor that she would call him no later than tomorrow afternoon. Trevor said ‘
Promise
, Momma?’ and Sissy said ‘Cross my heart and hope to spontaneously combust.’ She stood on the doorstep with the snow whirling all around her and waved him goodbye.

‘Get inside, Momma!’ he called back at her. ‘You’ll catch your death!’

She blew him a kiss and then she closed the door. As she returned to the living room, she jolted with shock. She thought she saw Gerry disappearing into his study, just a glimpse of him. She stopped, with one hand on her chest, and took two or three deep breaths. She didn’t see Gerry very often, but when she did it gave her that unbalanced feeling like stepping off a fairground ride and the world was still moving under her feet. But of course Gerry had died nearly three years ago, in February, on one of the darkest days that she could ever remember. The day that Gerry had died, she had had to keep the lights on from morning till night.

Mr Boots was watching her from his basket, one ear folded awkwardly back. Mr Boots knew when there were ghosts around.

‘What do you think, Mister?’ she asked him. ‘Do you think I should spend Christmas in sunny St. Pete?’

She waited, but Mr Boots said nothing; so she turned toward the study door. ‘More important, what do
you
think, Gerry? Do you think you’d be lonely, if I left you here, all on your own?’

Of course there was no answer. She knew that Gerry would have encouraged her to go, if he were still alive. ‘I’ll be OK on my own, you silly woman. I can cook ten times better than you. And I can finish sorting out my stamp collection.’

But he was dead now, and he couldn’t cook, or sort out his stamp collection, and she was worried that he might spend the winter wandering disconsolately from one chilly room to another. Worse than that—she, in Florida, would miss him so much that she couldn’t bear it. She poured herself another cup of tea, but it was cold now, and she couldn’t be bothered to brew a fresh pot.

Trevor and Jean always took wonderful care of her. In fact they looked after her
too
well, which made her suspect that they didn’t really like having her at all. Not
her
, as she actually was. Jean bought her flowery lilac dresses to wear, with pie-crust collars, and matching cardigans, so that she looked like a granny out of a child’s picture-book. Not only that, they gave her organic food and they always made sure that she washed her hair every day and they wouldn’t let her smoke. They allowed her two glasses of red wine with her evening meal (‘the Surgeon-General says it’s good for the heart’), but vodka was a no-no. Young Jake couldn’t have a grannie who dressed like a gypsy, breathed smoke out of her nostrils, talked to dead people, and drank Stolichnaya straight up. ‘I mean, what kind of an example is that, Momma?’

It’s probably an example of somebody who was brought up in an age when smoking and drinking weren’t dangerous, and people said exactly what they meant, whether it offended anybody or not. The good old days (although we didn’t know it at the time).

But Trevor was Gerry’s son and she couldn’t help loving him (for all that he dressed like a feedbag) and she adored little Jake and she could just about tolerate Jean if she didn’t start talking about
feng-shui
or colonic irrigation. ‘It makes you feel so
clean
, inside and out.’ Sissy couldn’t even tell Jean that she was full of shit, because she simply wasn’t, and she had the receipts to prove it.

Let the cards decide, Sissy decided.
They
can tell me if going to Florida is a wise idea. She opened up the bag that Trevor had brought with him, picked out a Cherry Mash, unwrapped it, and took a large bite. Then she went into the kitchen, opened the freezer and wrenched out the frosted bottle of Stolichnaya. She poured herself a generous glassful and took it back into the living room. She poked the fire a little, so that the logs lurched, and a shower of sparks flew up. She could hear the wind moaning across the chimney. It was going to be bitter out tonight.

She sat down again and opened up the large cardboard box that contained the DeVane cards. It was worn at the edges, and the lid had been repaired with Scotch tape.

‘Pictures of the world to be . . . I beg you now to speak to me.’

She always said these words when she took the cards out, even if she murmured them under her breath. The cards were so potent, so full of meaning, so characterful, she felt that they had to be asked for their co-operation. You had to give them
respect
. After all, you wouldn’t just walk into a roomful of clairvoyants and shout ‘Listen up! What’s going to happen to me tomorrow?’