Uncivil Seasons (17 page)

Spits up fire, I thought. Sister Resurrection’s fiery furnace. The dragon spits up fire, and down it rain.

It was only when I opened the door to my house and realized that all the lights were on and the heat had been turned up to at least eighty and the shower was running hard up on the top floor, that I remembered that Susan Whetstone had told me she was coming over. My rapping on the tub’s glass stall, as she had apparently not been able to hear me until then, in no way appeared to startle her. The impenetrability of Susan’s composure continued to impress me. Both hands still lathering her hair, she said, “Where have you been?”

I said, “You sound like we’re married, which only you are.”

She said, “I can’t hear you,” and slid the door closed.

I walked back down to the first floor and ate two jars of yogurt and a muffin while reading the day’s junk mail and bills. I swallowed four aspirin with some tomato juice, turned down the thermostat, picked up Susan’s mink coat, which was spread open on my couch, and her suede boots, which were toppled over in the middle of the rug; I shut off the lights, climbed the stairs, took off my clothes, and went back into the bathroom. The shower didn’t stop until I was brushing my teeth, staring at the red streaks in my eyes.

“Where have you been?” Susan said again.

“Working on the Dollard case. Tell me again, Susan. You can’t think of
anything
else Cloris said to you that night at the play except she had a stomachache?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, her stomach hurt, and wasn’t the play good, and when was Lawry coming back.”

“Why’d she ask that?”

“Well, she didn’t know about us, if that’s what you mean. She said something like, ‘I think he’s annoyed with me.’”

“Annoyed with you?”

“No, with her.”

“Why?”

“Who knows, sugar.”

“Was she upset, was she joking, was—”

“Not back to this again! I told you, she just yapped at me a few seconds at intermission.” Susan dropped the balled-up wash-cloth to the floor of the tub. “Who cares.”

“Seems to me the conversation would stick in your mind a little better considering the woman was murdered an hour later.”

“Considering I’m not a psychic, how was I supposed to know that at the time!” Susan stood in the tub, appraising with thumb and forefinger the girth of her waist, the hang of her upper arm, the firmness of her inner thigh. Her thighs were brown and slender. All of a sudden, they reminded me, distressingly reminded me of one hot August afternoon—it must have been the summer of my seventh birthday—when my father was driving us up to Virginia to visit his parents. I had yielded the front seat to my younger brother, Vaughan, and had fallen asleep in the back; my head on my mother’s lap, at the cuff of her red-and-white-dotted shorts. I woke up, my cheek sticky hot and stuck to the skin of her thighs. My eyes opened on a magnified world of gold-haired skin, whose tanning over the summer months had been an assiduous undertaking, discussed at length. (“Oh, Rowell, here you are already black as a berry, and I still look like an absolute fish!”) I pulled away from her thigh and saw the red imprint I’d left, and the stain of saliva that darkened her shorts. Then I lay my head down again in a new place, shivering with the pleasure of the cool, sinking soft flesh. I kept still there, pretending sleep, until finally she carefully slid away from me, and picked up her book.

In the bathroom mirror, now, my adult face flushed with blood. I couldn’t stand here naked, looking at a naked woman, and thinking about my mother’s thighs. I turned away to wrap a towel around me. Susan was saying, “All right? I talked to Lawry right after I got home from the play. There was a message on the service to call him back and I did. All right? I said, ‘Why does Cloris Dollard think you’re mad at her?’ and he said he had no idea why. All right?”

“I’m trying to find out what her
mood
was, Susan.”

“Her mood! What’s her mood got to do with a robber hitting her over the head? Justin, come on. Anyhow, why are
we
talking about it? I know, it’s your
job
. You better watch out, sugar. You’re beginning to remind me of my husband.”

I rinsed out my mouth and spat. “I thought you loved Lawry.”

“I do…So, I thought you had this case all solved. People were saying at Patty’s tonight that they heard on the news you all had arrested some creep. Meanwhile, that has got to be the most boring party I’ve gone to in a month.” She tilted her head, twisting water from her hair.

Susan had tan blond hair and sharp, beautiful bones and a perfected body kept the same tan blond color throughout the year by regular exposure to various beaches. Naked, she looked as if she were wearing a white bikini. I handed her one towel that she wrapped around her hair, and one that she tucked in over her breasts.

She said, “Laurel Fanshaw got blotto and puked all over the kitchen.”

“Charming.”

“She said she’d felt like throwing up ever since she got pregnant. She gave Patty a gorgeous Marimekko wall hanging. I don’t see why they wanted to give Patty another bridal shower anyhow; she’s already been divorced twice.”

“If Patty has a tag sale, let me know, would you? I could use some more pillows and sheets.”

“Funny man. And how’s your funny partner, Mr. Mangum, the good ole boy? Were you two out together, I bet?”

“Cuddy’s fine. Why are you so hostile, you think maybe we’ve gone gay?”

“Funny, funny. That man is so fake.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Oh, forget it.” She stepped out of the tub.

I said, “I’m sorry I’m so late. Pardon, pardon, pardon. How come you’re washing your hair?”

“I always wash my hair when I’m bored. If you’re going to stay out all night playing cops and robbers, why don’t you get a TV?”

“I don’t like the way they look.”

She shoved me away from the sink, leaned into the mirror, and said with the mildest pretense of sincerity, “I’ll tell you what I don’t like, sugar. I don’t like the way
I
look.”

“Oh, yes, you do.”

“Joel gave Patty a face-lift for an engagement present.”

I stepped behind her. “We aren’t engaged.”

She pressed her fingers against both cheekbones and pulled the tan blond skin tightly outward. Next to the thin platinum wedding band, the big square diamond flashed in the mirror. We both watched my hands come around and loosen the tuck in the towel until it fell away, and move over her breasts, and then downward until they dropped below the mirror’s view. In a while she rubbed back against me, her hands still on her face.

She said, “I thought you were going to be passive.”

“I am.”

“Oh? Something didn’t get the message.” She looked at me looking at her.

I took her hands and pulled them down around my back and held them with mine. We watched her nipples harden.

“I can’t stay too long,” she said. “I’ve got to go out to the airport early. Lawry’s in a vile mood about some stupid business deal of his falling through, or something.”

“I’m going to have to call him about this Cloris thing.”

“Is it midnight?” Susan asked.

“No.”

“Do you know if it is or not?”

“No.”

“I want to leave by midnight,” Susan said.

“All right.”

“You should have come back sooner.”

“Do you want me to hurry?” I pulled the towel from her hair.

•   •   •

When I woke up it was nearly four and she was gone and all the downstairs lights were on. I woke up because of another nightmare. I was playing Bottom again, that final Sunday performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the Hillston Playhouse, a small downtown movie theater we’d bought when it went out of business like most of the stores around it. We were doing the scene in the woods in which my cronies run off terrified after Puck transforms me, changes my head into that of a donkey, and Titania, the fairy queen, takes me off to her bower to make love. Titania, to my disturbed surprise, was Joanna Cadmean. Old Mr. Cadmean sat in the front row, his bent fingers patting the knee of his daughter Briggs, whose hair had been cut to short curls, like those of the C&W union representative, Alice MacLeod. Then it was intermission, and I saw Susan in her mink, standing in the aisle—as I’d actually noticed her that Sunday—talking to Cloris Dollard. Now Cloris was braced on Mrs. Cadmean’s crutches, and her nose was crushed in. Everyone pretended not to notice. Then I was in a car with Rowell Dollard, driving through the snowstorm back to the theater—I don’t know why I’d left—and trying frantically to get back there before intermission ended and I had to be onstage. I had on Bottom’s homespun costume, and the huge papier-mâché ass’s head lay on the car seat between us.

In the dream, I knew I had to keep out of my mind my certainty that Rowell had killed both Bainton Ames and, fifteen years later, his own wife. I knew that if I couldn’t void my brain of my suspicion, Rowell would be able to read it there and he would try to kill me, too. But the more I fought to erase the images, the more vividly detailed they grew, like an iris opening in a film. Beside me in his black overcoat, his face from the snowlight as silver as his hair, Rowell kept staring, harder and harder, into the side of my head, until I could feel he was seeing through my skull to what was in there. I sped up, pushing the accelerator to the floor, but nothing changed. The tires floated on in snow so deep all boundaries of the road had disappeared, and the front beams shone out at a white, endless lake, billowing around us. Then we were sliding down the long hill and into the curve at the bottom of Catawba Drive, near my parents’ home, the hill that had been in my dreams before. And down there, in the middle of the intersection, black rags in the snow, stood Sister Resurrection. Rowell snatched up the papier-mâché mask and jammed it over my head, and, blinded, I still saw the tree like the ghost of a giant looming. Then I heard the siren coming, as years ago I had heard it, waiting in the crashed car, holding my father.

I woke up uncovered and shivering. In the bathroom two white towels lay strewn on the floor. I showered to warm myself enough to stop shaking; then I put on some jeans and a heavy sweater and an old leather jacket. My tackle box, and rod and reel, were out on the back porch, icy to the touch.

When I pulled into a truck stop for breakfast an hour later, the world was still dark, and the woodpeckers and mockingbirds were just beginning to complain about the weather.

A poor pink started to wash through that blue-black opulence the sky has just before dawn, and I had come out of the little hills of the Piedmont and passed in the night with the trucks the scruffy little egg and hog farms, ramshackle in leached fields, the red clay and cornstubble and piney gum woods, lifelong familiar and so invisible. East on 64, I was sloping down into coastal lowlands, into flat earth fallow for the bright-leaf tobacco, and for cotton, the old king—throneless since Appomattox—like Bonnie Prince Charlie after Culloden Moor.

Wind was cold off the bright water of Albemarle Sound. Far away the wakes of menhaden and shrimp boats already ruffled, luring the white gulls down. As I met the ocean, the sun blew up over the horizon line, and I turned south off the causeway into the wilderness preserve of the Outer Banks. I was alone on the road for an hour. Shafts of sea oats bowed shaking to a sandy highway that warned of the dangers of leaving it.

Waiting for the ferry to Ocracoke, I fell asleep, and fell back asleep, crossing. And missed again the wild horses, descended from the mounts of buccaneers, that summer after summer I had never seen, though straining beside my father against the boat rail, binoculars at my eyes, gulls screeching in and out of view.

Ocracoke Island, to which former Hillston police captain Walter Stanhope had retreated, hides across rough water at the farthermost tip of Cape Hatteras. These are the barrier isles, spars of sand dunes, some heaped high as a hundred feet, all forever shifting, the longest stretch of wild shore on the eastern coast. Between the Banks and North Carolina are tangled inlets, too shallow and too dangerous for successful commerce, haunts of pirates and blockade-runners. Between the Banks and England swells the gray sea. They call Cape Hatteras the Graveyard of the Atlantic and boast of over two thousand ships buried there, lost beneath the foaming spume.

When I was a boy vacationing on the Banks, my father walked me out along the bleached plank fence on Diamond Shoals to see the black-and-white-striped lighthouse, the tallest in the country, the placard bragged. And yet, still defeated by the flat sea below, where rusted smokestacks and iron masts speared out of the waves like the arms of monsters drowning. From the Indies with Verrazano, conquistadors came here, and fled, conquered by swamp and the secret spars. It was in through the Outer Banks, past Kitty Hawk, that Sir Walter Raleigh—who wore clothes of silver and in one ear a pearl, and who dared more gorgeous madness than other men could dream—sent his colonists, saying, “Bring me gold to win back the favor of my queen.” At Manteo the earthworks of their fort are tended grass now.

The Outer Banks are a place to risk a dare, like courting queens, like flying; or a place for men, like Blackbeard, who need to be lost. Walter Stanhope, namesake of Elizabeth’s captain, had come back here to retire, among people still holding, in their faint Devonshire accents, a distant memory of Raleigh’s extravagant dream. Stanhope had come to lose himself here at the edge of the sea.

After some inquiries and some wandering among the narrow, sand-dusted streets, I finally found him, around eleven, out on the island’s oceanside, surf casting on the empty beach, a tin bucket wedged in the sand beside him.

“Mr. Stanhope?”

“Right.”

“Sorry to startle you. You’re not an easy man to find.”

“Savile?” He was a thin, reedy man in his late sixties, with a gaunt wrinkled face brown as my gloves. He wore a beat-up winter police jacket and frayed green rubber waders, a crumpled hat and sunglasses, and he clamped in his teeth an empty cob pipe.

“Yes, sir. Justin Savile. Thanks for seeing me. Regards from Hiram Davies. He’s well.”