Voices in the Dark (12 page)

“Do I dare ask?” he said and waited. Her scent was heavy, rich, musky. He wondered what ingredient of an animal, what furtive juice, had gone into it.

“She claims aliens took her on a spaceship and had their way with her.”

“I see.”

“She says she was sodomized.”

He was embarrassed. “What can I say?”

Mrs. Nichols was realistic but not unsympathetic. “Not much, I’m afraid.”

Eschewing the birdcage elevator, he progressed slowly up the grand stairway. At the top, replenishing his breath, he paused to look at a painting of nymphs bathing in a brook and, as always, admired the melodious play of light on skin. Then he moved on with a plodding step. Most of the doors were closed or ajar, but his mother’s was wide open. Her weak eyes grappled with the sight of him.

“Yes, it’s you,” she said. “Don’t just stand there.”

The lofty room reflected Mrs. Gunner’s tastes. The drapes were too heavy a maroon, and the furniture, massive and dark, seemed more suitable for a club where old men might mumble outrageous things to one another. A mirrored door led to a private bathroom, but Mrs. Gunner had insisted on a chrome potty chair near the bed.

“I’ll come back,” he said.

“No,” she said, and he fidgeted, an inappropriate presence while she peed. “Fat like your father, same flubby lips,” she said. “You’ll die like him, too much blubber around the heart.”

He remembered the problems with the casket, the way his father had seemed to swell out of it.

“There,” Mrs. Gunner said and, rising, made herself right. Her white hair, worn wild, had yellowed, prompting her to believe she was blond again. Her eyes, small and private, yet rife with inner light, were free of most worldly cares and free certainly of anxiety over death. Indeed, she awaited death with untoward glee, as if it were tantamount to a holiday. “Did Nichols tell you? I was buggered.”

“Are you all right now?”

“I hurt in the asshole, otherwise I’m okay.”

They moved to club chairs not unlike the ones in his study, but at the last moment she chose a plum armchair to sit in. He sank into leather. “My father,” he said, “was a genius.”

“He was a bully. I don’t want to talk about him.”

Gunner let his gaze wander. A heavy overstuffed sofa drank up much space. Unread books lined a shelf. With a furtive glance at his watch, he told himself he would stay ten minutes more, no longer.

“How’s Fay?” Mrs. Gunner asked.

“She’s dead, you know that.”

“That little girl was the only good thing in your marriage.”

He looked at his watch, which had grudgingly donated less than a minute. “She was defective, Mama.”

“You’re not?”

Through the years, since his father’s death, his mother’s tendency to wound had sharpened into a precision instrument. At the funeral he had suffered intense grief, she none at all. “Beverly sends her love,” he said suddenly. When he got no response, he added, “My wife.”

“I know very well who Beverly is. She’s me when I didn’t know better.”

He was relieved when a knock came on the open door and a woman wearing linen of bone white entered the room. The voice was stark. “Am I intruding?”

“If you were, I wouldn’t let you,” Mrs. Gunner said. “You remember Isabel, don’t you, Paul?”

“Of course he remembers me.
He’s
not the one who forgets things.” Isabel, who resided in the next room, spoke from a rigidity of too many face-lifts. Her skin looked as if it had been sized with glue and fitted to each bone. Her eye holes were punctures free of whites, her nose a blade. Her whole face seemed fictive inside a clarity it did not deserve. She and his mother were deadly friends. “How are you, dear Hilda?”

“You know what I’ve been through!” Mrs. Gunner said.

Isabel smiled at Gunner with red lips that looked ignitable. The points of her fingers were crimson. “Did she tell you she was violated?”

“He knows,” Mrs. Gunner said with a testy look.

“Your mother, poor dear, wants her adventures to be operatic, but they’re vaudeville.” Isabel dropped herself into the club chair facing his and crossed her legs, which were still intact and shapely. She clutched a packet of long cigarettes, a slim lighter wedged in the cellophane wrap. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I prefer you don’t,” Gunner said sternly.

“It’s my room, you smoke all you want,” his mother said in the instant, her chin held high with an authority never exerted in her marriage. Isabel lit up, and he drew in his chins with a shiver of disgust. His mother’s eyes flared. “You going to die on the spot? Look at him, Isabel. I had him too late in life. I never should’ve had him at all.”

He read his watch, his mother’s voice drilling a hole in his head.

“Your last-born, Isabel, how old were you?”

“I don’t think it matters, dear.”

“Of course it matters. Look what you’re saddled with. The devil put a mark on her face.”

Isabel Williams blew smoke. “Let’s leave my Mary out of it.”

Gunner felt himself gagging on the smoke. His rise from the chair took stupendous effort, which stained his cheeks. Both women were gazing at him with what could only be taken as mockery. “Is there anything you need?” he asked.

“Don’t talk nonsense. Everything I need is here, I have only to snap my fingers. Here we’re queens, aren’t we, Isabel?”

“We’re fucking beauties,” Isabel said.

When he leaned forward to kiss his mother, her head butted up and struck him. “No, you don’t!” she said.

His exit was ten minutes on the dot. Reaching the stairway, he ignored the nymphs and gripped the banister, which almost slid away from him. His descent was cautious. At the bottom, Mrs. Nichols’s eyeglasses refracted light.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Gunner? You don’t look well.”

He said, “When is she going to die?”

“That’s rather up to her,” Mrs. Nichols said.

• • •

Chief Morgan drove to Boston, to State Street, a funnel made miniscule by towering office buildings in which, he suspected, the world was governed. He pulled into a lot, where the attendant, whipping cars around like toys, paused to take his money. Minutes later, escaping the heat of the street, he passed through glass doors that had opened for him, padded over marble in his soft loafers, and at a bank of elevators stood among men in traditional custom suits of varying sobriety. No one glanced at him. It was as if he were not there.

He rode the elevator to a lofty height and stepped out into a reception area, where glass reflected him kindly but obscurely. A woman with stiff features but a pleasing voice took his name, spoke into a telephone, and then, looking up, said, “Yes, he’ll see you.” Another woman, her hair drawn in a chignon, showed him the way.

Harley Bodine’s office was elegantly spare and chaste, with a single piece of artwork on the wall and a great window that seemed level with the sky. Morgan almost expected to meet the eye of God. He was not asked to sit. Bodine came forward in the splendid fit of a suit that matched those of the men at the elevators. “My wife mentioned a picture,” he said in a brisk voice, and Morgan passed it over. Bodine stared at it intently. “This person knows something about my son’s death?”

“It’s possible.”

Bodine gave the picture a last look and returned it. “I’ve never seen him before. Who is he?”

“He calls himself Dudley, that’s all I know. I picked him up for vagrancy.”

“How stable is he?”

“Not very, but he knew your son wore braces. The picture the papers ran didn’t show that.”

“What else about my son?”

“That’s all he would say.”

Bodine’s eyes were thrusts of ice returning nothing, and his tone of voice possessed the same cold quality. “What do you think he’s holding back?”

“At this point I don’t know.”

“You’re quite right about the newspapers, Chief, but you’ve forgotten television. My son had little to smile about, but occasionally he did. The picture used on Channel Seven, eleven o’clock news, clearly showed the braces. How seriously do you take this man?”

Morgan faltered, wondering whether he was scraping air, questioning his own competence.

“Is he playing you for a fool?”

“That’s crossed my mind.”

“Have you told me everything?”

“Yes,” Morgan lied. “I may have overreacted.”

“Are you playing
me
for a fool?”

The air had altered between them. Morgan’s smile was incongruous, accidental, transitory. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Why have you involved yourself? What’s your interest?”

“It’s my job.”

“How far does your job go?” Bodine’s white teeth glared between thin lips, and in the instant he no longer seemed of sound mind. “I’ll make it plain. Are you screwing my wife?”

Guilt strained Morgan’s face, for the answer was
Many times in fantasy.
“No, sir,” he said, feeling absurd.

“I don’t believe you.”

“There’s something I haven’t told you,” Morgan said. “The man claims he kills children.”

• • •

Dudley’s state of mind was not good. His hands shook. His breakfast, eaten too fast, threatened to come up. Lying on the cot, the pillow doubled under his head, he scarcely responded when the woman with pony teeth asked whether he wanted an aspirin. Her face was fussed up for him. “Is it your bowels?” she asked solicitously, and he said, “No, I’ve had my poops.” She lingered outside the cell, eyeing him with concern. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked, and he told her not to worry, it comes and goes.

“What does?”

“Me,” he said.

The fan kept him cool. Closing his eyes, he slipped into an air pocket of a past kept alive by a false sun, a protected place where long-ago voices rang, clocks ticked without moving their hands, and he was his mother’s pet and his father’s pride. He was curls, ruffles, and short pants and kept his bottle until he was four and his teddy much longer. His mother used spit to clean the corners of his mouth. His father fixed his wee-wee when the skin stuck. The town was Exeter, the world at war. His father said he was going to kill Hitler, but Hitler killed him.

He opened his eyes when the sergeant they called Eugene brought him lunch, a chef’s salad he nibbled at before pushing it aside and returning his head to the pillow. He was eight when he and his mother moved from Exeter to Boston, the part called Dorchester, where families lived on top of one another in four-deckers, which he had never seen before. Nor had he seen before so many women wearing kerchiefs and dungarees and holding babies. Overheard women’s matters filled his ears: the whispers about cramps, the revelations of pregnancies, the asides about birth. “You’re the spit and image of your father,” his mother told him, but it was her spit on his face.

He was thrust into a strange public school, a brick building with no grass around it, no drawings taped to the classroom walls. He developed a crush on the girl seated beside him and exposed himself to gain her attention. The girl immediately told the teacher, an aggressive slip of a woman who summoned him to the front and announced to the class: “Dudley has something to show us.”

His eyes fluttered open at a sound outside the cell. “You’re back,” a woman said through the bars. She was the one who had visited him once before, with hair that looked as if it had just come out of curlers. It still looked that way. The padlock and chain disturbed her. “If they’re not treating you right, let me know,” she said, and he nodded, his heart beating hard, people caring for him. She was on her way to the library and offered to bring back books. “What’s your preference?” she asked, and he named a children’s book, which surprised her. “Really?”

“I don’t know your name,” he said.

“May,” she said.

“May,” he repeated. “It’s almost Mary but not quite.”

His classmates had been bullies, and Sweeney with a big moon face was the worst. In daily acts of terror, Sweeney bent his arm back, jabbed his privates, extorted his milk money, stomped his lunch box, and defaced his books. Cruelest of all, Sweeney stole his cat. In the backyard he saw the calico hanging from a crude gallows that brought a scream to his lips and his mother to the window. His mother did her best, but the only comfort came from his teddy bear, which he hid under his jacket when she took him to the child psychologist, who gave him crayons and paper and told him to draw. Afterward, an ear to the door, he heard that the boiling purple sun he had drawn was rage and betrayal felt from his father’s death. The puny stick figure snared in tendrils was his own insufficient self with nowhere to grow.

A sound stirred him, and through his eyelashes he discerned the gaunt figure of the reverend, who was offering him something through the bars. His stomach was better, his hands steady, and he pulled himself up. The peach was a hybrid, no fuzz, and he polished it with his palms. “How much of me is real?” he asked. “Can you guess?”

“It would be a wild one,” Reverend Stottle replied. “We are, all of us, Stardust.”

He nibbled. “Why are you staring?”

“I’m trying to understand you.”

“Why?”

“It’s my business.”

“I wasn’t born, Reverend. I was a trick out of a magician’s hat, a card drawn from my father’s sleeve.”

“Are you lonesome?”

“Not very.”

The reverend said, “How are you, May? Is that for him?”

He finished the peach and deposited the stone in his breast pocket. Wiping his hands on his jeans, he accepted the book and carried it to the cot, his touch respectful as he flipped pages. The print was large, and the illustrations of Jerry Muskrat and Jumper the Hare were in color. He pressed the open book to his face and breathed deeply, inhaling his childhood. He had no fear of Sweeney, whose name was etched on a tombstone. The dead sink into the depths or float off into the universe — either way they’re gone for good.

May Hutchins said, “When you finish it, I’ll bring you another.”

“This will do,” he said.

• • •

Looking in on her daughter, Regina Smith presented an intense face at odds with itself, arguments going on behind the dark eyes, nothing resolved, as the keen cut of the mouth vividly showed. Patricia was painting her nails, the fingers done, a few toes to go. Stepping over the threshold, Regina said, “Time we talked, young lady.”