Voices in the Dark (22 page)

Downstairs, a cup of decaf in front of her, she picked up the telephone. Despite the hour she rang up the hotel in Washington, woke her husband, and said, “Did you call earlier?”

“Yes.”

“Twice?”

“Yes. Why didn’t you answer?”

“I didn’t want to be disturbed.”

• • •

Paul Gunner moved like a bear to the window and glimpsed two sets of headlights at the distant gates, then only one set, which tottered up the long drive. He was waiting at the door when she came in wearing that straw wheel of a hat he found ridiculous. His face massive, he said, “Where the hell have you been?”

She tossed her hat negligently on a table. With no repairing hand to her hair, she said distractedly, “None of your business.”

“What have you been drinking?” A part of his mind that always stayed cool warned him to be careful. He saw a glitter of tears. “What’s the matter?”

“What could be the matter?” she said, dropping her bag on the table. “You have everything you want. You may even have more than you want.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She moved away as if his voice had glided in and out of her hearing. He followed her up the grand stairway. Her shoulders were set and her hand firmly on the banister with each step. At the landing, her other hand brushed over ferns in a floor vase.

In her bedroom, he said, “I want to know who you were with.”

She moved to a window, and he moved with her. Floodlights blazed over the grounds. Like acid, they ate into the dark and kept the greater dark at bay. “I was with a friend,” she said.

“What friend?”

“A dear one.”

“Is that all you’re going to tell me?”

“That’s all you need to know.” Turning, she pushed around him and seated herself at a vanity table, where she ran both hands through her hair and began removing her makeup. He hovered. She said, “Please don’t watch me age.”

He fell back a single step. Her face in the glass looked drained, wan, diminished, like that of a little girl bleached of her childhood. “Beverly,” he said. Authority was back in his voice. “You can’t bring Fay back. She’s gone. Can’t you get that through your head?”

“Yes,” she said. “I have.”

• • •

In the parking lot behind Rembrandt’s, Chief Morgan stepped out of Sergeant Avery’s automobile and returned to his own. Twenty minutes later he was back in Bensington, semicircling the green and pulling up at the church, behind which he could see lights burning in Reverend Stottle’s house.

The reverend, in shirt sleeves and stocking feet, answered his knock and then his question. “He was here, but he’s gone. It’s Chief Morgan, dear.”

“I can see him,” Mrs. Stottle said. Her voice had the ring of a church bell. Her blouse, worn over khaki shorts, was the same maroon as the prayer books in the pews. She appeared over her husband’s shoulder with a reproving look at Morgan. “Too bad you didn’t come earlier.”

Morgan agreed with his eyes, her secret kept. He said to the reverend, “Did he behave himself?”

“A perfect gentleman.”

“My husband says he’s a lost soul. I think he’s loony. What’s your assessment, Chief?”

“He’s different,” Morgan said. “I just want to keep an eye on him.”

Mrs. Stottle, lately stiffened in her ways, said, “We don’t see you in church much. In fact, I can’t remember the last time.”

The reverend poked her. “Different snores, different dreams. Remember that, Sarah. Hope you’re not going to stay up all night looking for him, Chief.”

“He can wait till morning. Sorry to have bothered you.”

Morgan went home. His unmade bed awaited him, his pillow bared loyally for his head, but he was too loose for sleep. In the kitchen he turned on the black-and-white TV and uncapped a beer. Tuned to a public channel, a nature film on desert life in Arizona, he watched with distaste a snake called a sand-swimmer break surface to embrace a scorpion, then to crush it and swallow it whole. He wondered whether the scorpion was suicidal and seemed to recall reading it was.

A sound from the outside, out of the ordinary, alerted him, and he sprang from his chair with an urgency he welcomed. His foot slipped on the floor where something had been spilled. When he flung open the back door and threw on the light, his neighbor’s mutt scampered off like a fugitive from justice.

He drove to the police station. Bertha Skagg, whose large floral dress made her look like an arrangement, was slumped back behind Meg O’Brien’s desk, her eyes closed and her lips fluttering. From the cell, where Officer Wetherfield was sacked out, he heard snores. Different snores, different dreams. Bertha Skagg opened her eyes and glared as if he had no right intruding.

“What are you doing here, Chief?”

“I thought he might be here.”

“Who?”

He remembered Bertha when she was pounds lighter and had a better disposition. “No one,” he said.

“Have you been drinking, Chief?”

“You call a beer drinking?”

“One leads to two.”

Mr. Skagg, soft-spoken, diminutive, hardly there unless one had stared directly at him, had died a quiet drunk. “Why don’t you go home, Bertha? I’ll be here for a while.”

“You think I’m not doing my job?”

“I didn’t say that.”

She rocked forward and planted her elbows. “I’m here for the night.”

So was he, and he slipped into the dark of his office.

• • •

Slipping out of bed, May Hutchins robbed her husband of covers and exposed his rump to the night breeze, which woke him. “Where are you going?” he asked, his unfocused eyes seeking her in the dim of the room. Sheathed in old nylon, her body was smoke in a bottle. “I know what you’re up to, May. Don’t go out there.”

“I just want to see,” she said.

“I’ll go.”

“No, you stay here.”

She stepped out the back door and let the night air soak her face. Grass wetted her ankles. Stars burning through distances too great to imagine gave her a sensation of otherness, and breezes snipping at her gown made her feel she had stepped out of her skin and was one with the flash of lightning bugs. The gazebo was empty, but a sound sneaked through the rippling air and reached her ear.

“I hear you,” she said.

The darkness was total behind the gazebo. Moving into it, she felt she heard the trees breathing like elephants. As a schoolgirl she had envied those chums of hers with predilections for folly. She felt a wheel was turning, coming around.

“Where are you?” she called out, expecting his face to burn a hole in the dark.

“I’m peeing,” Dudley said.

“I won’t bother you.” She stood still, no idea what part of the darkness he occupied. “Try not to go on the flowers.”

“I think I’m standing in some.”

It didn’t matter. She was poised on her toes, trying to get a fix on him. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” she said. “I’ll protect you.”

“Against what?”

She had to think through a moment of confusion, from which high school memories emerged, feelings swelled. “Against the world,” she said.

• • •

Lights blazing in her studio, Mary Williams showed Soldier her latest sketch of him. His balls, she told him, were the bells of his body, which that big tongue of his rang. He liked none of it. “You’re doing caricature again,” he said, fiercely prideful of his sinewy physique, hard work gone into every muscle. “I don’t have a belly. You gave me one.”

Her smile was uncanny. She’d had too much white wine. He was in his skivvies, ready for bed an hour ago. She reached out playfully.

“Cut it out,” he said. He did not like anyone to touch his navel. His prick, fine; his balls, tenderly; but his navel, no. “I don’t like being made fun of.”

“You’re thin-skinned.”

“I deserve respect.”

“How about a salute?”

“I was seventeen when I joined the fucking army. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“It’s military history, Soldier. I’ve heard it.”

His eyes burned. He missed the Oriental women who had bathed his body reverently, and he missed the olive drab of the old Ike jacket, which had stressed the youthfulness of his waist. “I was just a kid fighting in Korea, and I was an old pro when I went to ’Nam, two tours of duty.”

“War is meant to put youth in its place, Soldier. That’s usually the ground.”

She did not understand the patriotism inherent in the roll of a drum or the lathered emotions in the draping of a flag. He did not have the words to tell her, and even if he had, they would not have cohered into a sentence.

Her voice was thick. “Smart fellow like you should’ve realized that by now.”

She had no idea of the pomp, fuss, and effect that went with the wearing of a uniform, nor did he expect her to. After his retirement, she never would have comprehended his dismal feelings at an American Legion dance where the women were gussied up and the men sported big knots in their ties, warriors who had let themselves go.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s late.”

When a leg leaned out of her split skirt, he slung an arm around her, and for a moment they stood static, a balance of extremes. He guided her out of the studio, sniffed her hair, and remembered a woman in Munich who had uttered her frustrations in German, which he understood, and her joys in French, Greek to him. Before entering her room, he peered into Dudley’s.

“If he’s not coming back, I’d like to wear some of his clothes. He’s got some nice things.”

“No way, Soldier.”

He led her to the four-poster bed and sat her down on the frilly edge. He looked down at the center part of her hair and watched her cross a leg to slip off a shoe. “You look like a little girl playing a woman.”

“What I am,” she said, “is grace under pressure.”

• • •

Roland Hutchins heard sounds on the margin of his sleep. He woke up, pricked his ears, and, reaching through the covers, roused his wife, who had been sleeping soundly. “Someone’s in the house,” he whispered.

“You’re crazy.”

“No.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Listen.”

Her head rose from the pillow. “You’re right.”

Roland, coping with the banjo beat of his heart, rolled cautiously out of bed and sought his trousers in the dark. “I bet it’s him. Who else could it be? Good God, May, he could’ve killed us in our sleep.”

She moved like fire from the bed and groped for her bathrobe. “He’s our friend.”

“Your friend, not mine,” he whispered, ransacking a drawer.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting a weapon.” It was a flashlight. “Call the police station.”

“It’s not necessary.”

“Please, May, do as I say for once.”

But she didn’t. Together they crept downstairs, the beam of the flashlight leading the way. Roland nearly tripped. May brushed a wall for a light switch and missed it. There was a glow from the pantry, but the intruder was in the dark of the kitchen.

“We see you,” May said.

“I want to use your phone,” Dudley said.

They saw him only in chunks, by flashlight. Roland said, “You have no right coming in here.”

“Let him make his call,” May said. “Is it local?”

“May, this isn’t right.”

Dudley took a crumpled dollar bill from his pocket and placed it on the table. “It’s a toll call,” he said.

• • •

They talked in the dark, the covers pulled half over their heads. Soldier exulted in the warm-seasoned smell of a woman with her clothes off, her nearness enough to smother chills, stifle hysteria, the threat of which had been with him since birth. Thoughts rolling in his head, he said, “I don’t want him to come back.”

“You have no say in it, Soldier.” Her voice tried to be kind. “This is his home.”

“Who needs you more?”

“That’s not a question you really want to ask.”

His hand slid over the warmth of her. “Who gives you more?”

“You don’t know what he gives me. You can never know.”

His hand, which had hurled grenades and fed bazookas, glided at will. In his head was roller-skating music. “He’s not that much younger than me, Mary. Sixty years old, I still fuck like a rabbit.”

“It’s not a rabbit a woman wants.”

“Is it him or me you want, you know for sure?”

“He’s my friend, Soldier. He’s like my blood brother.”

“What am I?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you won’t let yourself know.” He moved closer, aware of dead notes in his voice. “I never told you this, but I was married once. She was a stripper. Her ass was in lights. The marriage didn’t last, six weeks, I think.”

“Long enough, I would wager.”

“I never knew my parents. My sister and I were brought up in foster homes, never the same one.”

“That’s not my problem, Soldier.”

“What is your problem?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to speak to my shrink.”

“I didn’t know you had one.”

“I used to.”

He dredged up souvenirs from his memory — the taste of this woman’s skin, the quality of that one’s voice — and knew what he wanted. “Who knows how long I’m going to live, Mary, the pension would be yours. Do you know what I’m telling you?”

She did not answer, but he felt a knot in her loosen, just a little, just enough. After a moment she said, “Did your sister know your parents?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say about them?”

“They were no good.”

From Beacon Street the occasional rumble of traffic, along with the random toot of a horn, was music to his ears as he applied himself. A breeze capped his shaved head like the liner in a steel helmet, and he felt the strong sensual pleasure he’d gotten from firing weapons or simply marching with one, the blood racing to his loins. Then a whistle shrieked. Not a whistle. It was the ring of the telephone.

“Get off me,” she said.

Reaching over him, the breath of her underarm in his face, she grabbed the receiver from its cradle. He heard her voice and the distinct one on the other end, and then he refused to listen. He muffled one ear in the pillow and hit the other with the heel of his hand, which hurt.

In ’Nam, the medics had ignored shattered men bleeding from the ears, from the rectum, and administered to those with glimmers of hope, of which he was one.
Easy does it, fella.