Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

  There he was, but still I found that I couldn’t approach him. And so I watched from a distant corner, my fingers tapping rhythmically against my knees, my eyes moving toward him, then away, as if fleeing a flash of brutal light.

  The night deepened hour by hour, but my father didn’t leave his chair. One sherry, sipped slowly, was followed by another. He ordered a plate of sliced ham and a piece of bread smeared with tomato, eating his dinner at a leisurely pace, his blue eyes closing from time to time as he leaned back tiredly against the tiled wall.

  From time to time, other men would sit down with him and chat awhile, but my father seemed to greet them distantly, talk to them absently, pay them little mind. As each one left, he merely nodded slowly and said, “Adios,” in a tone that seemed faintly sorrowful, so that even in the grip of my hatred I sensed that there had been a loneliness to his exile, things he had endured, losses he had silently absorbed. For a moment, I was able to imagine the long night of his escape, the flight to a distant land, the constant shifting from town to town, the years of fear and dread. What at 417 McDonald Drive, I wondered, could have been worth such a deep and endless sacrifice?

  At around ten, as he continued to sit alone and unmolested, an African trader in black trousers and a billowy purple shirt approached his table. A lavender turban was wound loosely around his head. He smiled at my father and drew several carved figures from a cloth bag, elephants of various sizes, a giraffe. He arranged them on my father’s table. My father glanced at them, then shook his head.

  The trader remained in place, persistent, trying to make a sale. My father shook his head again, then turned away, his eyes settling on one of the tile paintings that adorned the opposite wall, the head of a woman wreathed in luscious purple grapes. His eyes lingered on it, the eyelids slightly drooped, the skin wrinkled, but the eyes themselves still luminously blue, the way they’d looked that night as I’d stood, facing him from the third step.

  The trader drew a wooden mask from the dark sack. It was crudely carved and sloppily lacquered, a work done without interest and for little pay. He placed it on my father’s table, edging one of the elephants away.

  My father didn’t look at the mask, but only waved his hand languidly, refusing once again.

  The trader returned the carvings to his bag, then glanced about the tavern, his eyes large and bulging, his black skin nearly blue in the dimly lighted room. He saw no other likely customers and headed for the door.

  My father watched him as he walked away, the lavender turban weaving gently through a cloud of thick white smoke. A woman at the adjoining table gave my father a knowing glance, but my father only shrugged and lifted his glass in a faint, halfhearted toast.

  As I sat only a few yards from him, I wondered to what it was he might still offer even so weak a toast. Was it to life? To death? Could he toast others, or were they only doll-sized figures on a featureless landscape, things like a wife and children, things he could do without?

  It was nearly midnight when he rose suddenly, startling me far more than I had thought possible. I saw him rise and come toward me from the choking, smoke-filled depths of the tavern. He was upon me almost instantly, his shadow moving in a dark gray wave across my table. As he passed, I felt him brush my shoulder. I looked up and saw him glance down at me, nodding quickly, as if in apology, before he suddenly stopped dead and peered at me frozenly. For an instant, I thought he might have recognized me, and I quickly turned away. By the time I looked around again, he’d disappeared.

  But he didn’t go far, only a little way down the same narrow street, and into another tavern. It was emptier than the first, and he took a table at the back. I took a table not far away, and watched him more closely, as if afraid that he might vanish once again.

  Under the light which hung above him, I could see the dust that had settled upon the shoulders of his jacket. There was dust on his sleeves, as well, and dust on his shoes. As I sat, watching him, I imagined dust in great brown lumps pressing in upon his guts, his lungs, his brain. I imagined his veins thick with dust, a brown mud clogging the valves of his heart. I could even envision a thick, dusty blood pouring from him as I jerked the blade upward, gutting him in one swift thrust.

  He leaned back against the wall of the tavern and closed his eyes. I wondered if, at such a moment, he’d ever allowed his mind to return to McDonald Drive. Or did he go there only in a nightmare in which he watched helplessly as a little boy came down the basement stairs, stopped on the third step, and grimly leveled a shotgun at his panicked and unblinking eyes?

  His eyes opened suddenly, and I saw that they were aimed at me. He glanced away and didn’t look at me again. His hand lifted to his mouth, brushed against his lips, then drifted back down to his lap.

  I could see a torpor in his movements, a languidness which seemed to pull even at the sharp, sudden darting of his eyes. Moments later, when a dark-haired beauty strolled past his table, he didn’t follow her appreciatively, but simply let his eyes drop toward the glass he cradled gently in his right hand. At that moment he seemed quite shy, captured in shyness, almost shrunken, made of straw, himself a weightless miniature.

  And yet I was still afraid of him, afraid of the scenes with his mind, the long walk up the stairs, the look on Jamie’s still-living face, the backward plunge my sister’s ruptured body must have made as the volley struck her, the plaintive, begging eyes of my mother as she’d crouched behind the cardboard box. I knew that there was a hideous gallery of such pictures in his brain, though the fact that he’d lived with them for so long seemed unimaginable to me.

  Time passed, but my fear did not.

  I could feel my hand tremble each time I thought of approaching him, and it struck me as unseemly to be so afraid of such a spiritless old man. What could he possibly do to me at this point in our lives? His physical force entirely diminished, his moral force long ago destroyed, he was nothing but an empty shell, a shadow.

  And yet, I was afraid.

  I was afraid because, for all his weakness and frailty, he was still my father, and the line that connected us was still a line that he somehow controlled. In his presence, I felt myself become the little boy who’d moved down the stairs, felt his gaze stop me dead.

  I was afraid, and I knew why. I watched his eyes and knew exactly what I feared.

  After all these months of hating him, I was afraid that when we met at last, and after I’d confronted him with everything he’d done, rubbed his face in the blood of those he’d murdered, that after all that excruciating pain had been unearthed again, and he sat, stunned, stricken, his blue eyes resting upon mine, that at that moment I would see again, know again, only this time with perfect clarity, that he had never loved me.

  It was that which made me hate him again with a fierce, blinding passion. I hated him because he had not loved me enough to take me with him in his flight.

  I felt my body rise suddenly, as if called to duty by an overwhelming need. I felt it move forward smoothly, righteously, with an angelic, missionary grace.

  His eyes lifted toward me as I approached his table. Once I reached it, I started to speak, but to my amazement, he spoke first.

  “Stevie,” he said.

  Stunned at the sound of his voice, thrown entirely off track by the fact that he had spoken first, I didn’t answer him.

  “Stevie,” he repeated softly, “sit down.”

  Still, I couldn’t speak. And so I snatched the envelope from my pocket instead, took out the three photographs, and arranged them quickly on the table before him. There, beneath the weaving candle, he could see them in a dreadful line, my mother in her bed, Jamie on his back, Laura sprawled across the floor of her room.

  Then, at last, a voice leaped out at him. “Why did you do this?”

  He watched me, utterly calm. He seemed beyond fear or regret, beyond anything but the long travail of his seclusion. His eyes regarded me coolly. His hands didn’t tremble. The ancient power of his fatherhood surrounded h
im like a fortress wall.

  “We had happy times,” he said at last. “You remember them, don’t you, Stevie?” He leaned back, the broad shoulders pressed firmly against the tile wall. His eyes dropped toward the photographs, then leaped back up at me. “Happy times,” he said again.

  The face that watched me seemed hardly recognizable, the “happy times” little more than sparkling shards thrown up by a blasted family. I remembered other things, instead, the icy immobility of his face as he’d stared out at “Poor Dottie” from the smoky interior of the old brown van.

  “You didn’t love my mother, did you?” I asked.

  He looked surprised by the question, but unwilling to lie.

  “No,” he said.

  “She was dying.”

  Again the surprise, followed by the admission. “Yes, she was, Stevie.”

  “But you killed her anyway.”

  He started to speak, but I rushed ahead. “Why did you clean her up after that? Why did you put her in the bed that way:

  He shook his head slowly. “Respect, maybe, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Pity.”

  I could feel my mouth curl down in a cruel rebuke. “Respect? Pity? That’s why you laid her out like that?”

  “Yes, it is,” he answered firmly, as if it were a source of pride. “She was a very modest woman. I didn’t want her to be seen like that.”

  “What about Jamie?” I shot back. “You didn’t care how he was seen, did you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Leaving him in his room the way you did,” I told him brutally, “lying on his back like that, with his face blown off.”

  He turned away, flinching slightly. It was the first emotion he had shown, and I felt a cruel delight in its suggestion that I had at least some small power to wound him.

  “And what about Laura?” I asked tauntingly. “What about her?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I tapped the photograph that showed her on her back, her chest blown open, her bare, soiled feet pressing toward the lens.

  “You left her like Jamie,” I said, “lying in her blood.”

  He nodded, almost curtly. “Yes, I did.”

  My legs dissolved beneath me as if I were being pressed down by the sudden weight of his complete admission. I sank down into the chair opposite him and released a long, exhausted breath.

  “Why did you kill Laura?” I asked.

  The light blue eyes squeezed together. “Because I had to,” he said sharply, “because I had no choice.”

  It was a flat, factual response, with no hint of apology within it.

  I scoffed at the notion of his being forced to carry out such a crime. “You had to kill Laura?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  The old rigidity returned to his face. He stared at me stonily. “Once it started, I had to finish it.”

  “Once it started?”

  He shifted slightly and drew his hands back slowly until they finally dropped over the edge of the table. “The killing.” His eyes darted away, then returned. “It wasn’t what I wanted, Stevie.”

  Suddenly Swenson’s words rushed toward me. Someone else. Someone else was in that house. I stared at him evenly. “Who made you do it then?” I demanded. “Who did you do it for?”

  For the first time he seemed reluctant to answer.

  I looked at him determinedly. “Who wanted us all dead?”

  His face tensed. I could see that he was going back now, that I was forcing him back.

  I glared at him lethally. “Tell me what happened that day.”

  He looked at me as if I knew nothing, as if I’d just been born, something marvelous in its innocence, but which had to be despoiled.

  “That’s not when it began, that day,” he said. “It didn’t just happen, you know.”

  “Of course not,” I told him. “You’d planned it for a long time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those two tickets, remember?” I said. Then, so that he could have no doubt as to just how much I already knew, I added, Those two tickets to Mexico City, the ones you bought in June.”

  His face tightened. “You knew about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know?”

  “The police found out,” I said.

  He looked strangely relieved. “Oh,” he said, “the police.”

  “They found out everything,” I told him.

  He leaned forward slowly, his hands clasped together on the table. “No, they didn’t,” he said.

  “Everything except who helped you kill them,” I said.

  “Helped me?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one helped me, Stevie,” he said. “What I did, I did alone.”

  I stared at him doubtfully. “Two tickets,” I repeated, “one for you, and one for someone else.” I paused a moment. “Who was she?” I demanded, my voice almost a hiss, visions of Yo-landa Dawes circling in my mind.

  His face softened, his eyes resting almost gently upon me. “Do you remember that morning when we were all having breakfast and Laura was talking about a report she’d done in school, and Jamie kept attacking her, belittling her?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “Jamie was always at Laura,” he said, “always trying to humiliate her, to take away her dreams.”

  He was right, of course, and it was easy for me to see everything that had happened that morning, the terrible hatred my brother had shown for my sister, the delight he’d taken in chipping away at her vibrant, striving character. That morning he’d been even worse than usual, his small eyes focused upon her with a deadly earnest: You’re not going anywhere.

  My father turned away for a moment, drew in a deep breath, then looked back toward me. “I couldn’t take it that morning,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t stand to see what he was doing to your sister.” He smiled. “I knew how much she wanted out of life, you see,” he went on, “how much she wanted her life to be different.”

  “Different from what?” I asked.

  “Different from my life, Stevie,” he said. “Different from your mother’s life, and what Jamie’s life would probably have been.” He stopped, as if remembering her again in the full glory of her extravagant desire. “She talked to me about it, you know,” he added after a moment. “About all she wanted to do in her life, all the places she wanted to go.” He smiled softly. “She would come down in the basement where I was, and she would talk to me about it.” His eyes drifted away slightly. “Always barefoot, remember?” he said, almost wistfully. “I used to tell her to put on her shoes, but she never would. She was like that, untamed. She’d always go back up with her feet covered with that grit from the basement floor.” He grew silent for a moment, then shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “that morning after Jamie had acted the way he did, I went out and sat down in that little room we had, the one with the vines.” He stopped, his voice a little harder when he spoke again. “That’s when I decided that it couldn’t go on like it was, Stevie,” he said. “That something had to be done about it.”

  “You mean, something had to be done about Jamie?”

  “About what he was doing to your sister,” my father answered. “Something had to be done about that.”

  I remembered the look on his face as he’d sat alone in the solarium that morning. It was a grim, determined face, all doubt removed. It was then that he’d decided that “something had to be done,” I supposed, not while he’d sat gazing at my mother as she stooped over the flower garden, but that spring morning when Jamie had launched his attack upon the daughter that my father loved.

  My father’s hands drew back, each of them finally drifting over the edge of the table. “I told Laura about it a week later,” he said. “She came down to the solarium one night. It must have been toward the middle of that last summer.” He drew in a deep breath. “I told her what I wanted to do.”

  I looked at him, astonished. “Kill us,” I muttere
d.

  His eyes widened, staring at me unbelievingly. “What?”

  “That you were going to kill us,” I said, “you told Laura that?”

  He shook his head. “No, Stevie,” he said, “not that.” He paused a moment, watching me brokenly. “Never that.”

  “What then?”

  “I told her that I’d decided to take her away,” my father said, “that I’d looked through a lot of travel brochures, and that I’d already decided on the place.” He looked at me solemnly. “I told her that I’d already bought two tickets to Mexico, and that I was going to take her there.”

  “And leave the rest of us?” I asked.

  “Jamie wouldn’t have cared,” my father said. “And your mother, she’d always wanted to move back to Maine, where she’d grown up.” His face took on the look of a mournful revelation. “There was someone there, Stevie. Waiting for her, you might say. Someone from way back. Someone she’d never forgotten.”

  It was the phantom lover, of course, Jamie’s real father, a man in a mountain cabin, as I imagined him at that moment, writing letters to my mother on soft blue paper.

  “Jamie and your mother would both have been better off in another place,” my father said.

  “And me?”

  “You’re what made it hard, Stevie,” my father said. “I hadn’t really decided about you.”

  I stared at him bitterly. “At the time you killed them, you mean?” I asked brutally.

  My father did not so much as flinch. “I chose to save my daughter,” he said with a grave resignation.

  A strange pride gathered in his voice, and suddenly I recognized that at that moment when he’d told Laura of his plan to take her away, at that precise moment in his life, and perhaps for the only time, his love had taken on a fabled sweep, had become a thing of knights on horseback and maidens in dire distress, a romantic mission of preservation and defense, one far different from the type undertaken by those other men with whom Rebecca had already forever linked his name.