Songs in the Key of Death

by William Bankier

  On the way home, she was buoyant. Her window was down, her eyes narrowed against the rush of air. “If you and I were married, there’d be no problem,” she said. “Alvin would have to shut up.”

  “I’m already married. Did you forget?”

  “She’s left you. Get a divorce.”

  “What’s the rush to get married? You’re a kid, you’ve got your whole life. You’re a talented girl, you can write up a storm. I’m just a stupid ball player but I can recognize what you’ve got.”

  “Here we go.”

  “You sit at that desk bashing out promotion announcements and program scripts with one brain tied behind your back. Work, damn it. Write.” He glanced at her face, saw the down-turned mouth. “Develop the talent God gave you.”

  “Who asked Him?” she said. Then after half a mile of slipstream, she said, “Would you marry me if I said I was pregnant? I’m not, but if I told you I was?” She was smiling now. “You wouldn’t believe me, would you?”

  “Not in the nineteen-eighties.” He shrugged. “I believed it in the fifties.”

  Carmen passed Dolan’s desk one afternoon in the following week and dropped a sheaf of folded typewritten pages in front of him. “Read it and weep,” she said and wandered away. He glanced at page one, saw “Nor Iron Bars by Carmen Hopkins.” He was so excited by the manuscript, he couldn’t get on with his work. He took it to the washroom and read it in the privacy of a cubicle.

  She had written a story about a young girl in love with an older man. They both worked in a small-town radio station. There was practically no invention in it, the plot was his experience and hers, but it read like a house afire. At the end, the sports announcer was still with his wife and the girl was floating face-down in the bay.

  He emerged into the office and went to her desk, where she was elaborately turning the pages of a newspaper. “Come for coffee,” he said, handing her the manuscript.

  “You like?” It was the only time she had appeared nervous in front of him.

  “Come for coffee.”

  They went around the corner to the Paragon Cafe, where he ordered two coffees and the slab of cream pie she asked for. A kid. “Your story is brilliant,” he said. “Exactly what I wanted you to do. Keep it up.”

  “What for?”

  “Because you can.”

  “I tried it and now I know how easy it is. Big deal.”

  “You want to be infuriating, don’t you? Who are you trying to provoke, your father?”

  “The great prospector?” She laughed. “All he ever did was search for uranium that wasn’t there and come back once in a while to get my mother pregnant.”

  “Succeed for yourself,” Dolan pontificated. “Not for anybody else.”

  Carmen finished her pie, gave him the mischievous smile with her mouth half full. “I forget,” she said. “Did you promise the other night to marry me if you got me pregnant?”

  He knew she was teasing him, but his heart turned over anyway. “One of these days, kid—over my knee.”

  “Ready when you are,” she said.

  The Redmen were batting in the bottom of the third against the Napanee Oilers. The sun was setting behind the canning factory. Seated at the microphone in the press box under the grandstand roof, Dolan called the balls and strikes and kept up a flow of anecdote and description. He was feeling at peace with the world, almost smug, hoping Management never discovered that he would broadcast baseball for nothing. In the bleachers, several hundred fans in shirtsleeves watched and ate and drank and yelled at the players and the umpires.

  Around eight o’clock, Carmen made her way up the ladder and took a seat not far from Dolan. Perhaps to make her entry legal, she had put on her CBAY T-shirt. She was munching caramel corn from the famous narrow red box. When they cut back to the studio for a commercial she extended the package in his direction.

  “Thanks, I can’t. Gets in my throat.”

  “Is it all right for me to be here?”

  He looked at the scrubbed healthy face, the glistening braids, the ripe body in a shirt one size too small. “It is absolutely perfect for you to be here.” Then, encouraged by her glow, and just before his cue from the engineer, he said to her, “Carmen dear, life is a box of Cracker Jack and you are the prize in the pack.”

  She stirred the air above her head with a finger. “Hoopde-doo!” she said.

  After the game, they walked to his car in the parking lot behind the dance pavilion. The Clem Foy Five was playing inside, and through screened windows colored lights glowed behind the movement of dancing couples. They watched in silence holding hands. It was a big regret for Dolan that he couldn’t take the girl inside and hold her for a while to music. Now he drew her to him. She must have been reading his mind because she angled her cheek against his shoulder, rested her hand on his collar, pressed herself against him, and moving hardly at all, unsteady on gravel, they danced part of a chorus of “Moonglow.”

  “Come here often?” she said to lighten the atmosphere. He said nothing, unlocked the car, let her in, slammed the door, and strode around to the driver’s side. As he switched on, backed away, gunned a ferocious turn, and raced out of the fair grounds, she said, “You can come home with me tonight.”

  He said, “What?”

  “Alvin has gone away for few days. A friend of his called and asked him to go up to Montreal for some stag thing. A guy they know is getting married. He got on the train this afternoon.”

  Dolan drove in silence.

  “On the other hand, if you don’t want to—I just thought it would be nice to get in bed and not have to worry about rushing off.”

  He thought of what she had written. The young girl dead by her own hand. The possessive brother. The old athlete trying to squeeze a few more drops of flavor out of a desiccated life. She called it Nor Iron Bars. “I want to,” he said as he made the turn to take them down the hill toward Station Street. “I just can’t believe my luck.” In his mind, cutting through the confusion, Dolan heard a sound that was not hard to identify. It was the door of a cage slamming shut behind him...

  Her house reminded Dolan of vacation cottages he had inhabited in wilderness country. It was of frame construction, ramshackle, okay in summer as long as it didn’t rain. The furnishings were lightweight, carpets worn through, woodwork covered in paint faded years since to the color of an ancient keyboard. The telephone (only once had Dolan dared speak to her on this vulnerable line) hung on the kitchen wall. For a yard around it, the wallpaper was peppered with a buckshot explosion of scrawled numbers and messages.

  She found a bottle of gin and gave him a drink he did not want. “Relax,” she said, bouncing into place beside him on the sprung settee, tucking a leg under her where he could not miss seeing the plump, shiny curve where calf met thigh.

  She surveyed him with delight. “You’re among friends, Casey. Don’t look so mournful.”

  She gave him butterfly kisses with her eyelashes. He let his hand rest on that smooth leg. His anxiety evaporated and he began to share her excitement. The feeling reminded him of a time when he and some of the kids went into Woolworth’s on Front Street and lifted a few lead soldiers. It was wrong and he knew he would hate himself later, but the urge had been irresistible.

  Her bedroom was through a curtained doorway off the sitting room. She said, “Give me a minute,” and went in there. Dolan sat, glass in both hands, elbows on knees, staring at the floor. Strange, he thought. The room smelled of decay, it showed no evidence of maintenance and yet he sensed there was a stability about the place as if it would still be here, sheltering the Hopkins tribe in a hundred years, long after his tidy bungalow had been bulldozed and built over.

  “Ready!”

  He went to her in the silent bedroom, saw a small cot with the covers turned back, inviting in pink light from a tiny lamp. She was naked under a flimsy gown, torn at the hip. He embraced her and was so overpowered that he lost his balance and they did a struggling dance, laughing at t
hemselves. “You’d better lie down,” she said, “before you fall down.”

  The front door opened, then closed with a slam. Alvin’s voice was bored. “Carmen? You home?”

  Dolan went ice cold. He stepped away from her and faced the curtain. Footsteps in the other room. The brother’s boots showed in the light at the hem of the curtain. “You decent, kid?”

  “Yes,” she said in a tone of great weariness.

  “What is it?”

  “You may as well come in.”

  Alvin drew the curtain aside. He saw Dolan, saw his sister sitting on the edge of the bed. “What the hell?” He stayed where he was but raised his arm and pointed a finger at Dolan’s face. “You bastard!”

  “Alvin, calm down. He’s here because I asked him. I work, I bring in money—”

  “Shut your mouth.”

  “You don’t own me!”

  “Shut up!” Alvin’s voice rose. He moved toward Dolan.

  “Listen! Listen to me!” Carmen ran at her brother, grabbed his arm, and used her strength to turn him. “You touch him, you lay a hand on him—” her finger was in his face now “—and I’ll be gone so far from here you’ll never see me again!”

  Dolan felt as if he had been tied hand and foot and set on fire. He was due to die horribly and could do nothing about it. Shock numbed him. “I don’t want any trouble,” he said lamely, able to feel embarrassment through his panic at the weakness of his response.

  “Just go, Casey.” Carmen put her back against her brother, making way for Dolan’s departure. “Don’t say anything, get out, I’ll take care of this.” As he fled, she told him, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Seated in his car where he had parked it on the next street, Dolan had to wait a good minute before his fingers could fit the key to the ignition lock. As he drove away, he assured himself of one good thing emerging from the debacle—he would certainly not be spending any more time with that dangerous little bitch.

  Carmen was waiting for Dolan in the Coronet lounge. She had telephoned in sick to the radio station, taking a day’s leave. At four in the afternoon, with his evening broadcast mostly prepared, he had responded to her call and come down to see her. She was halfway through a beer. Soon due on the air, Dolan ordered coffee.

  “Can you believe it?” she opened. “That whole business about the stag in Montreal was a put-on. He suspected us. He set it up to catch you with me.”

  Dolan could believe anything of Alvin and he said so.

  “You don’t have to worry,” she said. “I’m sorry I put you through it.”

  “Not your fault,” he said bleakly. But he thought it was—why couldn’t she just leave him alone? He was old enough to be her father. Why all the provocative attention?

  “We talked for a long time after you left. Alvin can be sweet when you approach him the right way. At first he didn’t want to know but I kept on and finally he understood. We love each other.”

  “Carmen, did you see his face?”

  “He was all right later. I told him you want to marry me.”

  “Carmen—”

  “Don’t you? Are you just in this for what you can get?”

  “You know better.”

  “Well?”

  He tried to be patient with this stubborn child. “I have a wife.”

  “You talk as if you’ve got cancer. Millions of men get cured of wives. It’s called divorce.”

  “It takes two to get a divorce.”

  “Have you asked her? She doesn’t even live with you. She’s over in Centralia having a ball running her store. She’s probably waiting for you to bring up the subject.”

  It was all so complicated. What had happened to the quiet life he used to think was boring? A divorce would cost money. A wedding would cost money. Carmen would get pregnant. Babies cost money. He would be the oldest daddy in Baytown—laughter in the beverage rooms, to say the least.

  He drank his coffee doggedly, aware that she was watching him across her beer.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “I’ll drive over to Centralia and put the question to her.”

  Dolan waited until Sunday when he had no program to do and then drove down the Bayshore Road through a region of dairy farms and acres of half-grown corn, reaching the concrete towers of Centralia at five o’clock in the afternoon.

  He had always hated the big city. Years ago, the Redmen had come up against Centralia in a sudden-death semifinal leading to the Southern Ontario Baseball League championship. Baytown lost the game eleven to four and Dolan, besides going hitless, had allowed the ball to get past him twice and each time a run scored while he was scrambling around twenty feet behind homeplate, trying to find the handle.

  Warned by his telephone call the day before, Anna was waiting for him in the back garden when he walked around the side of the house. It was bigger than his place back home but she was only renting it, furnished. Reclining in a folding chair, an empty one beside her, she raised her sunglasses and studied him as he shambled across the grass.

  “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

  “Pining away without you.”

  “You look younger.” Her voice and her frown conveyed suspicion. “What’s her name?”

  There was a pitcher of lemonade and a couple of glasses on a table between the chairs. He poured himself a splash and sat down. “You’re a mindreader.”

  “Why else would you ask to come and see me?”

  “Maybe I miss you.”

  “Maybe, but you don’t.” She had not taken her eyes from his face. “Don’t look so pathetic. I wrote us off a long time ago.”

  “I hate it when you say that.”

  “Stop clinging to a finished thing. Move on, Case.”

  He set down his empty glass on the tin table. It rang like the signal for the start of round one. “Funny you should say that, Annie. I need a divorce.”

  “So. What’s her name?”

  “Carmen Hopkins.”

  Anna turned her head.

  “Is that the fat little teenager I met the last time I came into the station? You must be joking.”

  “She’s a clever young woman.”

  “She’s a bloody genius if she’s trapped you.” Her face was pale, she looked her age. “Is she pregnant?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “She’s saving her trump card. Casey, listen to me, I’m about to do you a favor.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “No way will I ever grant you a divorce to marry that carnivorous high-school dropout. If you were to come to me with some mature, intelligent, decent woman —” She watched his face for a few minutes while he counted blooms on hollyhocks. Then she got up and carried the pitcher and her glass to the house. “Crazy,” she threw back at him. “Out of sight.”

  Dolan came in a few minutes later and heard the shower drumming. He wandered through rooms he had seen only once before. He used to believe, like a kid, that he and Anna in the house in Baytown were permanent because nothing else could ever contain their relationship. He was wrong. There was always another way.

  She joined him as he was exploring the bedroom. It was a new robe, soft towelling in a shade of blue he liked, and she smelled of the lilac soap she had brought into his life decades ago. She stood beside him; there was no place for his arm except across her hip. They slipped easily into a familiar embrace. As they kissed, she whispered, “I was hoping you hadn’t driven all this way just to argue.”

  “Seems I didn’t,” he said.

  In the next hour, the light in the room diminished slowly as afternoon became evening. Casey lay at ease with Anna tucked close against his side. The occasional things she said buzzed against his ear. He was falling asleep. The trip had solved nothing. All it proved was that he and Anna could still get it on, but that had never been in doubt. They could not live together, and she would never, clearly, release him to marry Carmen.

  “No divorce?”

  “No divorce.”

&
nbsp; “You’re a bitch,” he said.

  “I’m the best friend you ever had.”

  They ate something at nine o’clock. By then, he was outside unlocking the car, making his escape from boredom, the nagging that was beginning to emerge—not all hers, he was dishing out his share. The car smelled strange inside, but he cranked down the window, switched on, and began to roll. Then Alvin Hopkins got up off the floor behind the driver’s seat and put a knife against his neck.

  “Hey!” The car swerved before Casey got control and stepped on the brake, easing to a stop fifty yards from Anna’s house.

  “Keep driving.”

  “How the hell did you get in here?”

  “You shouldn’t have given Carmen your spare key. She doesn’t even have a license.”

  “She told me she does.”

  “She tells you lots of things. Like I was going to Montreal for a friend’s wedding.”

  “She made that up?’

  “That’s right. My sister is crazy, don’t you know that? After Pete crashed his truck and died, she went out of the house one night and put her head on the mainline track, waiting for the Toronto express. I think she knew I’d find her and bring her back but I’m not sure.”

  “So the whole story about she’d be alone in the house for a couple of days was to get me found there by you.”

  “She likes excitement.”

  They drove slowly in silence, down empty streets. At last Dolan said, “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going back to Baytown. By bus, the way I came.”

  Dolan felt, at last, the cold tide of fear. It filled his gut, loosened his muscles, his foot relaxed on the accelerator.

  “Don’t do anything crazy.”

  “Keep driving. Turn left at the corner.”

  They drove into an area with trees and shrubs on either side of the road. Streetlamps cast pools of brilliance which only emphasized the black distances beyond.