Voices in the Dark (8 page)

He drove her without enthusiasm into South Boston, past fireplugs around which youths tended to gather, past a window display of dinette furniture, then through a preponderance of four-decker houses, where whoops of children could be heard from the alleys. When a man on a corner made a hawking-to-spit sound, she swiftly turned her head.

“My friend,” she said, “he lived here for a while when he was a boy.” She didn’t know exactly where. It might have been this tenement house or that one, for they lacked definition, as if anything could be going on inside, or nothing. Pointing, she said, “It could’ve been there.”

The driver kept his eyes straight ahead and drove all the way to the ocean edge, Day Boulevard, L Street Beach. He parked near the beach, swimming temporarily prohibited because of a high coliform count. Nobody was in the water, but people were on the sand, many women and children, a few young men, and scattered elderly persons. The driver kept the motor running and turned in his seat. His face was toil-worn, the skin burlap. “I think you’d better pay me now,” he said.

“I won’t run away. Come with me if you like.”

“This is not my neighborhood.”

“Then I won’t be long,” she promised.

She removed her sandals on the sidewalk and plowed into the heated sand, a yellow grit that stung her feet. The sky over the ocean gave her bigger feelings of things, along with a sense of the brink, the stepping off to anywhere. Her steps were scissor-like, her trespass onto the beach duly noted. The faces were Irish and struck a note. Where had she seen them before? Then she realized she had seen them everywhere.

A man with a face blown big with good cheer gave her the once-over. His tight trunks had a boastful pouch, as if holding all his belongings. Beachwear gave the women shapes that were overly honest. One stood explosive in pink, and another lay gummed in stretch nylon that look irremovable. Wandering among them, she felt like Cinderella, the feeling reinforced by the blemish on her cheek, soot from a chimney.

At the ocean’s edge, where a passing gull screeched like a wronged woman, she let all the pain from Dudley’s absence come to bear, which hours earlier might have driven her to her knees. Dangling her sandals from one hand, she stepped back when spume from a broken wave touched her toes. Turning, she came face to face with squalling children whose mothers screamed at them not to go into the water. One child did.

She would have retrieved the girl herself, but a mother reared up from a towel and charged forth, straps flying, breasts bolting a useless harness. The flesh was milk brought to a boil. The child, yanked by the arm as if it had no socket, stumbled on the wet sand. Punishment was swift, the second slap reverberating louder than the first. Each left a rose on the skin.

Trying to remain frigid and detached, she could watch no more and scurried away with the memory of another child nearly the twin of that one, the same flaxen hair and frail face and maybe even the same ruffled bathing suit. A child preserved in her sketch pad, eyes wondrously big, marvelously expressive. Midway up the beach her legs lost speed, and she paused to slip her sandals back on.

As she climbed into the taxi she noted a canteen truck across the street. Her driver, finishing a Fudgicle, tossed the stick out his window. “I took a chance,” he said.

“I don’t know your name. What is it?”

“It’s a simple name, the kind you forget. John.”

“Mine’s Mary.”

“Yes,” he said, peering at her in the rearview. “You look like a nice old-fashioned girl. Where to now, ma’am?”

“Take me home, John. Beacon Street.”

Traffic was rough, at times impossible, but no annoyance to her. Her eyes were closed. When the taxi finally pulled up at her brownstone, she rendered the fare with grace, the tip with generosity. She took two steps on the sidewalk and swerved back.

“Do you have a family, John?”

He leaned across the seat. “Children and grandchildren, ma’am. My wife works in an office building on State Street. She’s a cleaning lady, night work. Those buildings never sleep.”

“I’m a painter, John. An artist.” She hesitated. “I think you’d make a fine model.”

“I probably would, but I don’t need to go looking for trouble, do I?”

“I’d be willing to — ”

“Thank you all the same, ma’am, but this isn’t my neighborhood either.”

Soldier was waiting for her at the top of the stoop. He stood at parade rest, with the sun shooting rays at him. He said, “What the hell was that all about?”

She smiled wanly. “Dudley’s alive.”

Malcolm Crandall, who functioned as both town clerk and tax collector, left the town hall by the front door and went around the side to the police station. Meg O’Brien was on the phone and paid him no attention, which irked him, especially since the call sounded personal. He placed a buttock on the corner of her desk to force her to look at him. They did not particularly like each other. When she got off the phone, she said, “What’s your problem, Malcolm?”

“It’s my plumbing,” Crandall said in an ugly voice. “I can’t remember the last time I had a happy piss.”

“Spare the details. What do you want?”

He shrugged. He was heavy-set, gruff, ill-tempered, and usually in a pucker. Nipples showed through his drip-dry shirt. When he was much younger, military age, a sucker punch had disfigured his nose. With a disparaging glance at the chief’s vacant office, he said, “I see he isn’t in. Must be banging somebody. Anybody we know?”

A movement in Meg’s pony face perceptibly quickened. Her loyalty was ironbound. “Why don’t you ask him yourself, if you’ve got the guts?”

“That guy you locked up, is he arrested or just living off the town?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I pay taxes as well as collect ’em. Let me take a look at him. Might be somebody I know.”

He didn’t wait for permission, for the phone was ringing and she was reaching for it. Nor did he need to be told the way. He tramped the passageway to the end and peered through the bars, pleased with nothing he saw and outraged over what the prisoner was reading. His voice was controlled.

“They give you everything, huh? Even dirty magazines.”

Startled, Dudley quickly smiled. “I don’t have a TV.”

Crandall felt a throb. The little prick wanted hotel amenities.

Dudley said, “I like to watch the soaps.”

A fag to boot, a stinking flower, enough to make Crandall want to retch. “How about a boy? Would you like a little boy in there with you?”

“No, thank you,” Dudley said equably, sitting on the cot with his back to the wall. “But I see where you’re coming from.”

“You got no idea. Weren’t bars between us, I’d smear the floor with you, wipe you up with a rag.”

“I’ve been beaten up before. People like you.”

“If it was people like me, you wouldn’t be walkin’.”

That said, Crandall passed a hand over his flat hair and would have stomped off if the creep had not mocked him with another smile. Abruptly he gripped the bars, and the door jumped open. When he stepped into the cell, the moment was electric, power he hadn’t felt in years.

“Smile again,” he snarled. “Let’s see those dimples.”

Dudley sheltered his head in his arms and raised his knees protectively, displaying the ability to accept immediately what was irrevocable. The blows never came, for a voice barked at Crandall. It was Meg’s, which would not have stopped him, but another voice did. It was Chief Morgan’s.

“You’ve got no business here, Malcolm.”

The chief’s presence pulled Crandall from a state half reverie and half rage. Calming the motion in his face, he aimed a finger at Dudley, whose head was still buried. “Another time,” he said.

• • •

From his office Chief Morgan said, “We’ve got to get a lock for that door.”

“I’ve been telling you that for years,” Meg O’Brien replied from her desk. An hour later she was still at the desk because Bertha Skagg, her relief, had called in sick. With a glance at the wall clock, she shouted, “Somebody’s got to get him something to eat.”

Morgan, who had been on the phone, came out of his office. “Nothing on the prints,” he said. “Our friend’s still a zero.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Get rid of him. In the morning I’ll drive him to Andover and dump him off at a bus stop with a couple of bucks.”

“That sounds humane. In the meantime, you’d better feed him.”

The chief left the station and crossed the green. From the church came the peal of an organ; then great chords were struck. Reverend Stottle’s wife was practicing. Either that, or a tuner was busy. Morgan entered Tuck’s General Store and went to the deli counter, where he was waited on by George Tuck, the only one of three brothers to stutter. George said rapidly, without a hitch, “I hear you’ve got a pervert locked up.”

“Not for long,” Morgan said. “I’m going to free him tomorrow and run him for selectman.”

“That’ll l-l-liven things up.”

“What’s on sale, George?”

“Ch-ch-ch-ch — ”

“Yes, I’ll have it.”

Morgan returned to the station with a container of fried chicken legs and wings. The station was unattended. Meg was in the lavatory. Walking to the cell, he heard two voices. Entering the cell, he saw only Dudley.

“What are you doing?”

“Talking to myself,” Dudley said.

“When you do that, you become two persons. Which one is you?”

He smiled. “I’m the one without the answers.”

Morgan gave him the container and watched him lift the lid. Steam rushed up, the aroma filled the cell, and Dudley’s smile widened. “I can use my fingers, can’t I?” Morgan provided a napkin. “Hot!” Dudley said, gingerly handling a wing.

“I’ve a question,” Morgan said. “Are you an alcoholic?”

“I’m a bit of everything,” Dudley said, his teeth tearing flesh from a flimsy network of bone, which for some reason provoked an unease in Morgan. “It’s good!” Dudley pronounced.

“I thought you’d like it.”

“A picnic, almost.”

“I’m letting you go tomorrow,” Morgan said, and the look he received was angular.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’ll add a couple of dollars to the one in your pocket and send you on your way, out of town.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? What do you mean, maybe?”

“You might change your mind.”

“I don’t do that easily.”

Dudley licked his fingers. “I might change it for you.”

4

SWEEPING ASIDE A SINGLE COVER, BEVERLY GUNNER ROSE WITH no awareness of dreams, a blessing. Too often baby demons invaded her sleep, pink-fleshed creatures born wrong and gathered for revenge, her daughter among them. Fay, who had entered the world defective, left it eight years later in a splash no one heard. Motors were revving, they said. Attention was elsewhere. No longer could she look at a body of water without imagining her child’s soul in it. And only surreptitiously could she open the album preserving Fay’s short history, for her husband did not like to see her poring over it. Nor did their two sons, the spit and image of him.

Stepping onto a lambskin rug, she stared at the wall picture she had not put there and had never dared take down. It was a color photograph framed in silver, bride and groom blown big. The bride was full-figured and dewy, encapsuled in a time when she had trusted the sentiments of popular songs and took faith from happy endings in movies. The groom, gripping her, was a tawny bear.

She looked at her watch. Gunner was still asleep but would soon need waking. They had separate bedrooms, hers the larger one, not because she had preferred it but because he had wanted one less elaborate, more masculine, more in tune with a self-image that exalted his bloodline, Prussian on his father’s side and Hessian on his mother’s. Her blood, Dutch and Danish, had been acceptable.

She stepped into her bathroom, which adjoined his, though the door was locked on his side. His privacy was sacrosanct, his foibles supreme. Like the rest of the house, a manor befitting him, her bathroom was his design, which the builder and subcontractor had executed to the letter, overwhelming necessities with luxuries, a sauna she could have done without, a whirlpool she never used, a bidet the gilt likes of which embarrassed her. His bathroom was spartan, with a shower stall that barely contained his big breathing.

Bathed and dressed, she did her hair, a puff of gold, over which she sprayed a shell. Moments later, she left her bedroom and quietly entered his. The only extravagance was a water bed. “Paul,” she said, and he came out of the covers like a whale surfacing to spout. The bigness of his belly sheltered his sex. His feet hitting the hardwood floor were fat thuds.

“Boys up?”

“No.”

“Let ’em sleep.”

His bullying voice she had long grown used to. His eyes were mere dents in his face. When he moved the flesh swam. It floated and drifted. It followed currents and tides and rode waves, everything a-quiver except his buttocks, which were concrete. From his bathroom, he told her what he wanted for breakfast, though it never varied.

Breakfast was on a low balcony, near which a trellis bled roses and honeysuckle drew hummingbirds. She buttered his toast, poured his juice, and served him jumbo eggs scrambled into a fluff. She would eat later when her stomach settled. Coffee suited her for now.

“God damn it,” he said, looking beyond the honeysuckle. A grubbing skunk had left divots on the billiard-cloth lawn. “Make sure they see that,” he said, and she nodded, for it was her job to pass on instructions to the men who came weekly to tend the grounds, though he frequently interfered, as if she were sure to leave something out.

He scooped egg and crunched toast. He was a fast eater, with a need for his napkin, which he kept poised in one hand. She stared at his lowered head, at the thinning spot in his fair hair, and dearly missed the years his software company had consumed his life, his absences long, his presence a surprise and not always unpleasant. Now that he was home most of the time, she was attendant on wishes often no more than whims.

“Bodine will be dropping by later,” he said, which both surprised and pleased her. “I’ll see him in my study.”

She was surprised because late yesterday he and Harley Bodine had talked for hours, much longer than usual, and she was pleased because she would have time for herself, no interruptions. Then she remembered that the boys would be up, each with his own demands.