Wild Horses (43 page)

The closet door remained closed, covered with another poster that might appeal to a young girl’s fancy: a serene and soft-focus picture of a young woman with face averted, caught in ephemeral grace upon the burnished floor of a dance studio. He opened the door and told those within that it was safe now, that they had to leave the room, that he would take them to their mother.

Out they came, wary and frightened as rabbits, rumpled and hungry, red of eye and wet of pants. The boy toddled into his arms but the girl did not. Tom followed her gaze across her room, to the dead heap against the wall. She looked at it, then at him, making connections with a heartbreaking acuteness that belonged on no five-year-old face.

He wondered if yesterday and today would end soon for her, or if for years to come she might dream of strange men in her room, and of the violence they brought with them.

*

Madeline hung on past the last gunshots as if by some miracle she might find herself able to keep going.

Allison watched the final hopes dim in her eyes as soon as Tom called down the hallway that it was finished. Madeline had been gazing toward the door, but she now let her head loll to the other side and shut her eyes and bled during each shallow breath.

Connie sprang to her feet, then rushed into the hall.

Allison sat on the floor with the confiscated guns, but they weren’t needed. Madeline’s breath wheezed and rattled. So Allison held Boyd’s head in her lap as she used to weeks and months ago, at the end of long days, even after suspecting that they each had made a mistake in the other and that both knew it but were too curious or stubborn to say so, and would rather hurt than admit being wrong. Love — lust, even — was no different from any other game of chance, in that true skill meant knowing when to leave the table.

His open eye roved about the room. She’d positioned herself so that her body blocked anything he might see of Krystal. Boyd nodded toward the wall, any wall, and she assumed that he meant those hideous and inescapable clowns.

“Wasn’t it, like, Oscar Wilde’s last words,” he murmured, “something like ‘Either that wallpaper goes or I go’?”

“Curtains,” she said. “I think it was the curtains.”

“Close.” He sighed with the rank breath of swallowed blood. “This is a bitch.”

“You’re not … going anywhere … are you?”

He told her he didn’t know, they’d just have to wait and see; that he hoped not but couldn’t explain why, not with the condition of his body and his life. Soon he looked up at her, gripped with a terror that she couldn’t name, and that he had no time to name for her. She wept for their wrongs and held him tighter until the fear subsided in his eye, then he touched her wrist, and went.

Allison turned to find Tom watching from the doorway, and he nodded and, just as he had yesterday, knew when to turn his back and give her the gift of solitude.

Although with Madeline in the room it wasn’t the same.

“Gunther’s not coming back,” Allison told her. It seemed very important she understand this.

“Yeah,” Madeline grunted. “I got the idea already.”

“So die, why don’t you? Just die. You know you want to.”

“I did what I can, the rest isn’t up to me.” Madeline lolled her head back this way. “I wouldn’t mind … some help.”

Allison shook her head. “I don’t think I could do that now.”

Madeline’s gaze settled on the pistols. “One of those … and I’ll do the rest.”

“I’m not giving you a gun, either.”

“Well that, then.” She crooked a finger toward the razor.

Allison stared at the obtuse angle it made on the floor. This far, at least, she could go. Madeline was better dead for more reasons than she could count. Allison laid Boyd aside and stood, kicked the razor to Madeline’s side, watched her turn it as though mesmerized by the blade’s keen edge and its possibilities, then Allison gathered up the guns and left the room to the dead and the deserving.

She found Tom trembling against the banister, midway down the first flight of stairs; told him she’d be back in a moment.

On leaving the house she could hear sirens outside, perhaps a few blocks away, no more. So she worked quickly, running to the van, opening the spare tire case, taking out a small rag-wrapped bundle hidden there earlier. Then back she ran into the house.

The rags were peeled aside by the time Allison met him on the stairs again, and she made sure Tom saw it: the revolver, fired yesterday by both their hands.

“Gunther.” She pointed up to the shattered door. “In there?”

Tom nodded.

“When it comes up … when they ask … he took this from me on Monday. In Texas. Do you understand?”

Tom said that he did.

“Because if he could find out things about you the way he did, he wouldn’t have any problem finding my father. That’s where they must’ve gone first, yesterday. Doesn’t that sound right?”

Slowly, he nodded. And said that it did.

While the sirens drew near, and Tom watched her ascend the stairs; while Constance kept the kids in the guest room out of sight of things they shouldn’t see; while Lainie asked why her father wasn’t there for her and when he would be…

While all these things swirled about her, Allison entered the room where Lainie had slept and dreamed and trusted, and found it not unlike the room across town where she herself had grown up and also been forced to learn some things too soon. And if the power of lies was among them, then that was only fitting, and in some small way was one accountability for other days settled at last.

She drew the sheet aside and found Gunther stinking beneath it, and wiped the revolver clean, bullets too, before pressing it once into his hand, then tucking it behind his belt. When she left the room she felt that she should close the door, as though latching a secret inside a heart-shaped locket, but on second thought she couldn’t see the point, because in their zeal and in their thirst for one another’s blood they had filled it with so damned many holes.

CHAPTER 26

By the latter half of October, Tom found that the middle of the previous month had come to feel like a dream, in which he’d said and done things that bore no likeness to the life he knew or the man he thought he was. And so, having returned to that man’s life in Panama City, it seemed that those words and deeds, like any dream, should be of no concern to anyone but himself. But this was not so.

Many of those exploits were known to others — certainly among those he employed and those who were his neighbors, but also among voracious strangers who watched their TVs or read newspapers or gossiped with others over drinks or fences.

They knew him now, or believed they did, even when their faces stirred no recognition and even less desire to accept their accolades or satisfy their curiosities. They made him nervous. It felt as though they’d insinuated themselves in his soul and been somehow privy to those parts of himself that should have remained protected by the impermeable boundaries of the dream.

I’m no hero,
he could’ve told them,
because what you know is only the part that sounded the best. The rest of it we left out.

The greatest refuge was his work, as it had always been when times turned cruel. Beneath his hands and blades and needles the leather drew its first breaths of new life as he awakened all the potentials that lay dormant inside each swatch of once-dead hide.

ST. JOHN’S APOCALYPSE,
read the labels. Under the lettering a highway vanished over a fiery horizon streaked orange and red, where an immense black sun had newly set.
Clothing for the End of the Road.
And he realized that he was there.

Aunt Jess phoned frequently from South Carolina to check on him. As always she called him Tommy, and told him how proud his mother would’ve been of him, saving those two children. He must have put it off for four or five calls before working up nerve enough to turn to the past and blow away its dust.

“Do you remember much about my father?” he asked. “Not the big things, more like … the little things.”

“We’re very few of us big people, Tommy. We’re mostly all of us made of little things. Yes, I have memories of the man.”

“Do you remember,” he began with tremendous hesitation, “what kind of pet names he had for me when I was little? If he ever called me anything like ‘Tom-Tom’?”

She thought about it, then told him she recalled having heard nothing of the sort, but this didn’t mean it had never been used.

Missing nothing, Aunt Jess picked away at pretense with her septuagenarian grace. “After he left the family, you told your mother more than once that someday you’d just strike out on your own until you found him. You’ve not been making good on foolish old promises, have you, Tommy?”

“Probably not,” he said, then asked if she had any pictures of the man lying around in drawers or boxes, taking up space. His mother, after all, had done such a thorough job eradicating every trace of the man she’d married — all but his son — that Tom was left with no memory of his face. Jess told him that she could probably scrape up a few, and send them in a day or two.

“That’d be good,” Tom said. “I’d appreciate that. But … if you would? Could you double-wrap them? Because I might not want to look at them right away. And there’s no reason for me to open that package and have them falling out all over the place. I might want to keep them around awhile, so that should keep them safe … until I’m ready to look.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll triple-wrap them,” said Aunt Jess. “That’ll give you an extra chance to change your mind.”

He told her that would be fine, and looked forward to the day when it wouldn’t matter what the photos had to tell him, for only on that day would he feel certain that, whoever else he was, he was no father’s son that he didn’t want to be.

*

Because she was family and because she was now alone with her children and because sometimes people need the presence of someone who remembers them from long ago, Allison decided that she should stay with Constance awhile after all.

Her cousin decided that for her and for the kids, the house was forever ruined, and nearly as soon as the holes were patched and the glass replaced and the blood mopped up, it was put on the market. As went the house, so went the town itself — when Constance announced she could no longer live there, Allison told her it was a smart decision, and helped her pack, and they moved to Jackson. Ten times the size of Yazoo City, it was a land of opportunity to Constance, to Lainie a world full of large and unfamiliar threats, and to Allison merely the latest hostel in a string of hostels, from which she would one day surely move.

Jefferson’s life insurance paid off handsomely, with double indemnity. Money would be no problem anytime soon.

With children in bed and autumn stars in the sky, Allison and Constance would some nights spread a blanket on the back lawn of the rented house and share a bottle of wine and occasionally something stronger, and deep into the night they would talk as freely of mid-September as Allison knew that Tom, most likely, was not.

“That marriage wasn’t going to make it, Allie,” Constance admitted, for some reason waiting until they had moved to speak of it aloud. “Jeff … I’ve never seen a more unhappy person with any less idea of why he felt that way. I think he’d decided it was the rest of us.”

“You never let on to me.” But Allison wasn’t surprised.

“It’s the way we were raised, you know. Don’t let anybody see that smile slip, even if it’s no more real than a Halloween false face.” Constance raised the wine to the face in the moon before she drank. “And as far as the bedroom was concerned, forget it. Whenever Jeff had trouble falling asleep, I’d tell him to pretend he’d just come. That usually did the trick.”

They laughed long and hard, once Allison got over the shock; it had come from a Connie whom she’d never really heard before.

“You must’ve had some idea what was wrong with him,” Allison said, “even if he didn’t.”

“Oh, sure. Sure. I don’t think there’s anything sadder than watching someone come to realize that the best time they ever had in their life was over before they really understood much about it. No matter what Jeff did, I don’t think one bit of it made him half as happy as the things he did when he was eighteen. Get together with his friends, and that’s all you’d ever hear about. ‘Remember when…?’ Like every one of them was so busy keeping yesterday alive they forgot about today.”

A common human failing, although Allison couldn’t decide which yesterdays were harder to let go of: the best, or the worst.

But Constance was right — it was no true life, holding on to your past so fiercely that you denied yourself a future. And so Allison wondered if, when tempted to live like that, the best way to treat your yesterdays wasn’t simply to kill them all, and let the playwright sort them out.

*

She came one evening, finally, from the near northwest, and when she did, the days were getting shorter, and Thomas St. John cherished the lengthy nights as though the darkness were a friend, because the worst things he’d ever seen people do to each other had been done in the light of day.