Uncivil Seasons

by Michael Malone

  I said, “I’m sorry I’m so late. Pardon, pardon, pardon. How come you’re washing your hair?”

  “I always wash my hair when I’m bored. If you’re going to stay out all night playing cops and robbers, why don’t you get a TV?”

  “I don’t like the way they look.”

  She shoved me away from the sink, leaned into the mirror, and said with the mildest pretense of sincerity, “I’ll tell you what I don’t like, sugar. I don’t like the way I look.”

  “Oh, yes, you do.”

  “Joel gave Patty a face-lift for an engagement present.”

  I stepped behind her. “We aren’t engaged.”

  She pressed her fingers against both cheekbones and pulled the tan blond skin tightly outward. Next to the thin platinum wedding band, the big square diamond flashed in the mirror. We both watched my hands come around and loosen the tuck in the towel until it fell away, and move over her breasts, and then downward until they dropped below the mirror’s view. In a while she rubbed back against me, her hands still on her face.

  She said, “I thought you were going to be passive.”

  “I am.”

  “Oh? Something didn’t get the message.” She looked at me looking at her.

  I took her hands and pulled them down around my back and held them with mine. We watched her nipples harden.

  “I can’t stay too long,” she said. “I’ve got to go out to the airport early. Lawry’s in a vile mood about some stupid business deal of his falling through, or something.”

  “I’m going to have to call him about this Cloris thing.”

  “Is it midnight?” Susan asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you know if it is or not?”

  “No.”

  “I want to leave by midnight,” Susan said.

  “All right.”

  “You should have come back sooner.”

  “Do you want me to hurry?” I pulled the towel from her hair.

  • • •

  When I woke up it was nearly four and she was gone and all the downstairs lights were on. I woke up because of another nightmare. I was playing Bottom again, that final Sunday performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hillston Playhouse, a small downtown movie theater we’d bought when it went out of business like most of the stores around it. We were doing the scene in the woods in which my cronies run off terrified after Puck transforms me, changes my head into that of a donkey, and Titania, the fairy queen, takes me off to her bower to make love. Titania, to my disturbed surprise, was Joanna Cadmean. Old Mr. Cadmean sat in the front row, his bent fingers patting the knee of his daughter Briggs, whose hair had been cut to short curls, like those of the C&W union representative, Alice MacLeod. Then it was intermission, and I saw Susan in her mink, standing in the aisle—as I’d actually noticed her that Sunday—talking to Cloris Dollard. Now Cloris was braced on Mrs. Cadmean’s crutches, and her nose was crushed in. Everyone pretended not to notice. Then I was in a car with Rowell Dollard, driving through the snowstorm back to the theater—I don’t know why I’d left—and trying frantically to get back there before intermission ended and I had to be onstage. I had on Bottom’s homespun costume, and the huge papier-mâché ass’s head lay on the car seat between us.

  In the dream, I knew I had to keep out of my mind my certainty that Rowell had killed both Bainton Ames and, fifteen years later, his own wife. I knew that if I couldn’t void my brain of my suspicion, Rowell would be able to read it there and he would try to kill me, too. But the more I fought to erase the images, the more vividly detailed they grew, like an iris opening in a film. Beside me in his black overcoat, his face from the snowlight as silver as his hair, Rowell kept staring, harder and harder, into the side of my head, until I could feel he was seeing through my skull to what was in there. I sped up, pushing the accelerator to the floor, but nothing changed. The tires floated on in snow so deep all boundaries of the road had disappeared, and the front beams shone out at a white, endless lake, billowing around us. Then we were sliding down the long hill and into the curve at the bottom of Catawba Drive, near my parents’ home, the hill that had been in my dreams before. And down there, in the middle of the intersection, black rags in the snow, stood Sister Resurrection. Rowell snatched up the papier-mâché mask and jammed it over my head, and, blinded, I still saw the tree like the ghost of a giant looming. Then I heard the siren coming, as years ago I had heard it, waiting in the crashed car, holding my father.

  I woke up uncovered and shivering. In the bathroom two white towels lay strewn on the floor. I showered to warm myself enough to stop shaking; then I put on some jeans and a heavy sweater and an old leather jacket. My tackle box, and rod and reel, were out on the back porch, icy to the touch.

  When I pulled into a truck stop for breakfast an hour later, the world was still dark, and the woodpeckers and mockingbirds were just beginning to complain about the weather.

  Chapter 14

  Wednesday, January 19

  A poor pink started to wash through that blue-black opulence the sky has just before dawn, and I had come out of the little hills of the Piedmont and passed in the night with the trucks the scruffy little egg and hog farms, ramshackle in leached fields, the red clay and cornstubble and piney gum woods, lifelong familiar and so invisible. East on 64, I was sloping down into coastal lowlands, into flat earth fallow for the bright-leaf tobacco, and for cotton, the old king—throneless since Appomattox—like Bonnie Prince Charlie after Culloden Moor.

  Wind was cold off the bright water of Albemarle Sound. Far away the wakes of menhaden and shrimp boats already ruffled, luring the white gulls down. As I met the ocean, the sun blew up over the horizon line, and I turned south off the causeway into the wilderness preserve of the Outer Banks. I was alone on the road for an hour. Shafts of sea oats bowed shaking to a sandy highway that warned of the dangers of leaving it.

  Waiting for the ferry to Ocracoke, I fell asleep, and fell back asleep, crossing. And missed again the wild horses, descended from the mounts of buccaneers, that summer after summer I had never seen, though straining beside my father against the boat rail, binoculars at my eyes, gulls screeching in and out of view.

  Ocracoke Island, to which former Hillston police captain Walter Stanhope had retreated, hides across rough water at the farthermost tip of Cape Hatteras. These are the barrier isles, spars of sand dunes, some heaped high as a hundred feet, all forever shifting, the longest stretch of wild shore on the eastern coast. Between the Banks and North Carolina are tangled inlets, too shallow and too dangerous for successful commerce, haunts of pirates and blockade-runners. Between the Banks and England swells the gray sea. They call Cape Hatteras the Graveyard of the Atlantic and boast of over two thousand ships buried there, lost beneath the foaming spume.

  When I was a boy vacationing on the Banks, my father walked me out along the bleached plank fence on Diamond Shoals to see the black-and-white-striped lighthouse, the tallest in the country, the placard bragged. And yet, still defeated by the flat sea below, where rusted smokestacks and iron masts speared out of the waves like the arms of monsters drowning. From the Indies with Verrazano, conquistadors came here, and fled, conquered by swamp and the secret spars. It was in through the Outer Banks, past Kitty Hawk, that Sir Walter Raleigh—who wore clothes of silver and in one ear a pearl, and who dared more gorgeous madness than other men could dream—sent his colonists, saying, “Bring me gold to win back the favor of my queen.” At Manteo the earthworks of their fort are tended grass now.

  The Outer Banks are a place to risk a dare, like courting queens, like flying; or a place for men, like Blackbeard, who need to be lost. Walter Stanhope, namesake of Elizabeth’s captain, had come back here to retire, among people still holding, in their faint Devonshire accents, a distant memory of Raleigh’s extravagant dream. Stanhope had come to lose himself here at the edge of the sea.

  After some inquiries and some wandering among the narrow, sand-dusted streets, I finally found h
im, around eleven, out on the island’s oceanside, surf casting on the empty beach, a tin bucket wedged in the sand beside him.

  “Mr. Stanhope?”

  “Right.”

  “Sorry to startle you. You’re not an easy man to find.”

  “Savile?” He was a thin, reedy man in his late sixties, with a gaunt wrinkled face brown as my gloves. He wore a beat-up winter police jacket and frayed green rubber waders, a crumpled hat and sunglasses, and he clamped in his teeth an empty cob pipe.

  “Yes, sir. Justin Savile. Thanks for seeing me. Regards from Hiram Davies. He’s well.”

  “Okay.” Pulling down his sunglasses, he looked at me as if people were something foreign and their purposes dubious.

  According to Davies, Walter Stanhope had lived alone since his wife had died; he had no other family. He was a native Banker, who actually had worked in Hillston only a decade. It was said that old Briggs Cadmean had been instrumental in maneuvering the city council into first appointing Stanhope Hillston’s police chief. What had impressed Cadmean was the man’s management of a flare of civil rights disorders in the small coastal town where he was then chief. Stanhope’s Hillston predecessor had a brutish reputation that, in Cadmean’s view, might give our city a bad name. It had been under that earlier man’s regime that Sister Resurrection’s son had been killed.

  “Drive okay?” Stanhope finally asked and pushed his sun-glasses back up over his eyes.

  “Fine. Catch anything?”

  “Some.” In the bucket two croakers floated.

  “Kind of windy out here, isn’t it?” I wiped at the tears already chapping my cheeks.

  “I guess. Not so bad. Where’re you staying?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  The glasses came down again. His eyes were the color of the sea, an impenetrable grayish green. “Lotta places are closed up.”

  “I noticed. Looks like you lost some houses, too. I haven’t been out on the Banks in a while.”

  Stanhope reeled in, unhooked some kelp from his lure, and cast. The whir of his bright brass spinning reel sent the line on and on over the ruffled waves. “Lost some in ’73. Whole place’ll be gone before long. The Army Corps of Engineers finally quit messing with those dune walls. Guess they figured they’d poured enough millions into the water. Hurricane tides sucked the groins right out.” He stopped with a brusque rasp of his throat, as if surprised to hear his voice go on so long.

  I said, “Amazing the sanguinity of the human race, rebuilding on sand that already slid out from under you.”

  “Amazing the stupidity.”

  By now I was close to a jog trying to stamp the sting from my numb toes. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee, Mr. Stanhope? Maybe some lunch?”

  “I’ve got coffee at home…You really come here to fish?”

  “Well, sir, to tell you the truth, I hoped you wouldn’t mind if I asked you a few questions about the old days in Hillston, and maybe get some advice. Had you heard that Rowell Dollard’s wife was murdered January the ninth?”

  His teeth, tannic colored, shifted back and forth on the pipe’s cracked stem. “During a robbery, I heard on the news.”

  “I’m not so sure I think so.”

  “I’m retired, fifteen years.” He reeled in a few turns on his line. “I don’t much like looking back. What did Hiram say to you about me?”

  “He said your dismissal was totally unjustified.” It was totally untrue that Davies had said so, but nevertheless accurate. I added, “A lot of people in Hillston say you were a good chief, Mr. Stanhope. I think maybe too good.”

  “I don’t much like Hillston,” he said, and added a few minutes later, “You work under Van Fulcher?”

  “Out from under him, as much as I can. We’re not friendly.”

  The sunglasses were pulled back down the hawked nose. “I used to work under some of your Dollard kin. We weren’t friendly.”

  “Fulcher’s better at going along with them than you and I are.”

  I interpreted his tug on his line as a nod. He reeled in, hooked the lure to the guide, and said, “I live over there.” Then he picked up the bucket and started toward the weedy dunes behind us, his feet sliding easily as he climbed through the soft sand. Silently we went past a collapsing plank walkway now jutting out into the air, the shore beneath it shifted away; its house’s windows were boarded, and old beer cans, left doubtless by partying trespassers, cluttered the porch. “That your car?”

  I nodded. “Can I leave it there?”

  “Up to you. Austin 100-4?”

  “Yes, sir. Used to be a nice green.”

  “Parts must cost a penny.”

  “About what I earn.”

  Far down the beach, scouted by furtive sandpipers, a solitary man moved with a metal detector, as though he had been condemned by Herculean gods to sweep clean the coast. “Stupid,” said Stanhope when I pointed at the treasure hunter.

  I said, “Well, they used to claim Blackbeard’s gold’s still buried out here somewhere in the dunes near where he was killed.”

  “There’s no gold.” It seemed to be a flat statement about life. Stanhope motioned me across the deserted highway and down a narrow cul-de-sac, dark with moss-hung oaks and yaupon.

  “There might be,” I called ahead. “Things get buried.”

  His head jerked back at the sea. “Lot of gold out there.” He said “out” as my father—a Tidewater Virginian, had—“oot.” Clearing his throat through a voice that sounded, as it had on the phone, rusty from lack of use, he added, “At Nags Head, men used to tie lanterns to their horses’ necks, drive them along the coast dunes. To trick the ships into smashing on the reefs. They’d loot the wrecks after the drowned washed off.” He stopped at the door of a tiny bleached-wood cottage and added, “I don’t much like people,” and took his tackle and bucket inside.

  Like its owner, Stanhope’s living room was brown and worn and sparse: no pictures, few books. There were, however, long shelves of records, and as soon as he came in, he put on a stack of LPs. The first was string music, perhaps Mozart, very quiet. He also had an old television, with rabbit ears covered by foil, that sat beneath a cabinet neatly lined with conch shells whose shiny peach inner curls were the brightest color in the room.

  He asked hoarsely, “Are you hungry?”

  I admitted that I was, and at a small Formica table in the small kitchen, we ate the fish chowder he had left to warm on the stove top.

  Telling Stanhope about the Cloris Dollard case was not easy, as he did not so much as nod, but I faltered on through his silence until I’d explained everything I’d come to suspect. Then we sat there without a word. Finally he said, “You want that coffee?”

  “Thank you, yes. You see, if Cloris found out Rowell had killed to get her—and maybe he also had done something under the table about selling Bainton Ames’s textile shares to Whetstone, I don’t know—but if she was going to leave him, or expose him… Rowell wants to go to Washington, Mr. Stanhope. One more term in the state senate’s all, and then he wants to run for a congressional seat. If he had to choose between Cloris and his ambition…”

  Stanhope combed the pipestem through thin, brown hair paler than his scalp. “Killed the woman he killed for?” he asked in the inflectionless tone his voice kept.

  “Well, this is fifteen years later. Maybe they were fighting and he did it accidentally. Panicked and tried to make it look like a robbery.”

  “Why’d he come home from the capital in the middle of the night to accidentally kill her?”

  “Maybe she called him in Raleigh; she said she was leaving the play because of a stomachache, but maybe she was actually upset about Rowell. The last time he can confirm his where-abouts in Raleigh is 9:50. That’s plenty of time for him to drive to Hillston. We’ve got ’til midnight for time of death.”

  Stanhope brushed his eyebrows. “Joanna Cadmean put this notion in your head?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Okay.” />
  “Look, you know yourself Mrs. Cadmean’s not just some kind of nut. I’ve been back to the newspaper files on her. The bodies in the basement like that! She’s listed as instrumental in the solving of at least thirty crimes.”

  He poured coffee from a tin pot. “I don’t deny it,” he said. “Dollard got a lot of use out of that girl.”

  “She thinks you didn’t like her.”

  “Didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  Staring into his empty pipe bowl, he shook his head. “No reason. Superstition. Gut.”

  “Did Rowell dislike her? I mean, then? He hates her now.”

  Stanhope looked at me for a while. Finally, he cleared his throat with a cough. “I’ll say it this way. How that girl Joanna felt about her…what she called visions, was how she felt about Rowell Dollard. She’d do anything he’d have wanted her to.”

  I stopped looking for a match and took the cigarette out of my mouth. “She was infatuated with him?” I didn’t want to believe this.

  As he handed me his box of kitchen matches, Stanhope nodded. “He was taking her to bed. Not that it’s anybody’s business.”

  “Are you sure? It’s hard to believe. What happened?”

  “Hard to believe of him?”

  “Of her. Well, she was, what, only eighteen?” I saw Mrs. Cadmean at the top of his stairs. Hello, Rowell. “What happened?”

  “Guess it ended. Dollard got promoted, moved to Raleigh.”

  “How do you know they were lovers?”

  “People talk. People are sloppy. People are spiteful. And I’m a good cop. Was.” He slid his pipe along his teeth.

  Leaning over toward him, I said, “Tell me. You did think Dollard might have killed Bainton Ames. Didn’t you?”

  Instead of answering, he dumped the two fish from his pail into the sink and started scraping their scales off.

  I went on. “You think what I think, don’t you? Rowell was in that boat, he pushed Ames out, and then swam to shore. He’s an impatient, violent man. He wanted Cloris, and Ames wouldn’t divorce her.”

  His palm on the fish, Stanhope carefully slit open its belly. “I considered it,” he said.