“Listen now. And listen good, Canny.…” The tone of his voice was frightening, even to him. “You’re … I gotta … You see, I ain’t always been …” He looked away and folded the letter again. “This is the street.”
He opened the car door and got out. “C’mere,” he said, beckoning her across the seat. Her eyes on him warily, she got out and stood close to the car, watching him back onto the sidewalk. “C’mon,” he whispered, but she wouldn’t follow. He went back and picked her up. Her arms fastened around his neck as he walked slowly down the street. “See that big house,” he whispered at her ear. “The one with the round porch. All you gotta do’s go up and ring the bell, or if they don’t have one, knock on the door. But you gotta knock loud acourse … ’cause they’ll be asleep.” His footsteps scraped over the gritty sidewalk. “Give ’em this letter,” he whispered, bending to set her down. Her legs roped around his waist. She buried her face in his neck.
“No,” she murmured. She held his neck so tightly he felt dizzy and staggered against the thick, dark shrubs. He reached back to pry her arms loose. “Let go! Dammit, Canny! I gotta do this! You want a licking? You’re gonna get one! Let go! Dammit!” he cried, finally parting her knotted fingers. He pushed her legs from him and got her down on the sidewalk. He tossed the letter at her, turned, and ran toward the car. Behind him dogged the quick flap flap flap of her rubber sandals on the pavement. “Poppy!” she screamed. “Poppy! Don’t leave, Poppy! Please, Poppy! I won’t be bad.… I love you, Poppy! I love you.…”
“Elizabeth?” came an anxious voice from the corner house.
Canny shrieked with terror and both she and Wallace turned to see an old woman with long white hair standing in the second-floor window.
“Poppy!” Canny shrieked, and flew at him. He clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled her close.
The screen rose in the window. “Elizabeth Bird! What are you doing out there so early in the morning? Does your mother.… Oh!” The old woman gasped as she leaned and peered down at the child in Wallace’s arms. “Not again,” she groaned. For a moment Wallace and the old woman stared at one another, frozen in open-mouthed horror.
“You’re gonna dump me,” Canny said between teary gasps. “Just like they said.” Her chest heaved and fell. She sat close against him, her arms locked on his. The old car sputtered each time he accelerated. He drove with his eyes on the rearview. Any minute now, he expected to see a cruiser break through the darkness at him.
“Shh,” he kept saying.
“You wanna dump me. You and Momma’re sick of me. You hate me. Everybody hates me,” she cried, her shoulders trembling with sobs.
“Shh … look for a phone.…” He could barely speak. The words hurt his throat. His tongue was thick and unpliant. Shoulda left her, he thought. Shoulda just run.
“Don’t dump me, Poppy. Please don’t!” she wept, squirreling her head up under his driving arm. She turned her face into his chest. “I’ll be good. I’ll be so good you’ll think I’m gone.”
Most of what she said he didn’t hear, but the feel of her mouth working against him was like another heart beating into his.
He turned right and found himself back on Main Street. What’s the plan? he kept asking himself. What’s the plan? In his panic, he had forgotten. Bringing her back was all of it he could recall. If he couldn’t drop her off, then he’d call the Birds and tell them where to find her. He’d leave her in the telephone booth. He’d tell her Dotty was coming; that she should wait for Dotty. He’d give her the letter to hold. The letter! He felt on the seat and realized he must have dropped it when the old woman called out the window. He couldn’t even remember what he had written in the letter. Not a single word came to him.
From a distance came the sound of a siren. Ahead, there was a telephone booth on the edge of a parking lot that lay like a shoreless black lake between a dry cleaners and a ladies’ dress shop. Wallace pulled in and parked close to the dress shop. In the streetlight, the window mannequins’ sad, grainy faces all seemed to be watching him.
“C’mon,” he said. He opened his door and did not even have to pull her after him, so tightly did she cling, her legs skittering with his. “Who’re you calling?” she asked. “You calling Momma? Tell her I’ll be so …”
“Shh …,” he said, pulling her against him so he could close the door on the booth. The siren grew louder.
“Tell her let’s go,” Canny hissed. “Tell her all Ellie’s things’re in the truck.…”
“Shh!” He fished in his pocket and held the handful of change close to his face. No dimes. All he had was a nickel, pennies, and four quarters. He dropped a quarter into the slot. The sudden buzz of the dial tone startled him. He pushed the button for the operator.
Canny was tugging at his shirt. “Tell her.…”
“Don’t!” he said. “Don’t do …”
The operator answered and his head snapped up. “Hello, I need somebody’s number.” He tried to turn his back to Canny, but she turned with him. “Mr. Bird,” he said. “Louis.”
The operator asked him the town he was calling.
“Stonefield,” he said, but he couldn’t remember the street. “It’s a big white house,” he said into the phone. “With a big round …”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the operator interrupted. “That is an unpublished number.”
At the mention of the big white house, Canny had twisted her arms around his waist. She stared up at him. He lowered his voice and turned his head. “I know. That’s why I need it.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t give it to you.…”
“But I …” He listened and realized she had hung up. His quarter rattled down into the metal cup.
“Who’s Bird, Poppy?” Canny shook his arm. “How come you’re calling somebody?”
“Shh.…”
“Call Momma! Who’re you calling? You calling Momma?” she asked as he dropped the quarter into the slot and pressed the button.
“Hello,” he said, when the operator answered. “I gotta make a call to Atkinson, Vermont, but I only got a couple quarters.” He examined the change in his palm, held it close to the glass. Canny looked too. “Seventy-five … eighty-six cents,” she counted, pointing to each coin.
“Eighty-six cents,” he told the operator. “Okay,” he said after listening to the operator’s explanation. “But I don’t know if she’ll pay. It’s been a while. She … Hyacinth Wallace,” he said, and then in just giving her his old number felt a weakness in his joints that made his legs go boneless. The ground rippled under his feet. “Aubrey Wallace,” he said, closing his eyes tight and hunching forward as the ringing began.
“Poppy.…” Canny kept grabbing his arm.
“Hullo?” came the distant voice, the flesh of it still too distant to perceive.
She’ll know what to do, he thought, hearing the operator ask if she would accept a collect call. There was static on the line. It crackled in his ear like an electrical charge, like lightning. Maybe there’s a storm there, he thought. The operator repeated her question.
“Aubrey Wallace ain’t here no more,” answered the voice he knew was Hyacinth’s.
In the background he heard a man’s voice, dark and muffled from beneath sheets, a pillow, from way down deep. At first Wallace thought two lines had crossed, that two different connections had been made. And then the old bed creaked. He might have been in the room, in that dark, square room, he could hear it so clearly.
“And neither is Mrs. Wallace. This is Hyacinth Farnham you got. Mrs. Henry T. J. P. Farnham,” she added proudly.
“Poppy! It’s …” Canny hissed.
“Damn,” he whispered. Now why’d Hyacinth say that? He couldn’t get what she meant straight.
Canny tugged on his arm. “Poppy!”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the operator was saying in his ear. “Would you like …”
Click! And the phone went dead. It was that hand, that thick yellow-haired arm that sh
ot past his face to press down the lever, then took the receiver from his hand, never saying a word, not one single word. Huller’s gun nudged him out of the booth back to his car.
Behind him, he could hear Canny’s voice far, far off in the night, scared and asking Dotty over and over what had happened. “What’s wrong? Oh Momma, your face is so beat up … it’s so sore.…”
“You bastard!” Huller snarled, and with vicious stabs drove the gun muzzle over and over into his spine as he went. “You stupid little bastard.…”
They were at the car. Huller opened the door. With the back of his hand, he hit Wallace’s head and shoved him inside, down onto the seat. “Don’t try nothing. Don’t even think of it,” he snarled, as Dotty climbed in next to Wallace. Her face was mashed and puffy and crooked. The red slits of her eyes were no more than glassy little blood cuts; the tip of her nose skewed crookedly sideways; and her lips were dark and thickly protuberant. It was a dead face, days dead and bloated and ugly, distorted and rippling in the glare of the passing headlights like a corpse floating face up. She didn’t make a sound.
“She’ll be in the truck with me,” Huller said through the window. “Just keep that in mind. I got the kid and the gun.”
They were halfway back before either one of them spoke.
“I was tryna call home,” he said. His head ached and his chest hurt. He didn’t dare tell her he had brought Canny to the street where the Birds lived. “I was gonna tell her I’m coming home. I was gonna take Canny and go home. I had it all wrote out.”
She said nothing. In the darkness she struck a quick hissing match and lit the cigarette she held in the corner of her mouth that wasn’t split.
“I told ’em how it happened … how it waren’t on purpose, how …”
“Shut up,” she said thickly, her jaw rigid and outthrust. “Just shut up.”
“He said he’d shoot her. He said he could do that!” Wallace said, suddenly enraged. “I heard him say so!”
“He won’t,” Dotty said.
“And he’s gonna get me arrested,” Wallace said. “He’ll.…”
“No, he won’t,” she said, in that same dull, level tone like a voice in the dark, beyond a wall, unreachable. “It’s all different now.”
So she still don’t care, he thought. It’s just him and her that matters.
In the dark quiet the house stood tall and depthless as an enormous headstone. A light went on in an upstairs window and then it went off. The curtain parted and a blank white face looked down at them. Huller pulled in behind them, parking sideways to block the mouth of the driveway. He got out and opened Canny’s door and held out his arms to her. She jumped down close to the truck and, ignoring Huller, started for the car. He caught her by the shoulder, turned her, then steered her toward the house. When he opened the door to put her inside, the dog sprang onto the porch. Yelping gratefully, it came to run at Huller’s heels in a low, slavish crouch. It whined and rubbed its matted coat against Huller’s legs while he stood by the open window telling Dotty it was up to her now to keep this thing together.
She stared straight ahead, in profile her battered face strangely resembling Alma’s.
“In a few hours, it’ll be done,” Huller was saying. “But you gotta stay tough.” He reached in and lifted her chin. “I feel shitty about this … about hurting you.…”
She nodded in an almost imperceptible, trancelike, rocking movement.
“Of all people … after all you’ve done.… Jesus!” He kept it up, speaking to her in his low, smooth rattle.
“I need something,” she said.
“No more pills. There’s only a couple hours left. You’ve got to be sharp!” Huller said.
“The gun,” she said, forming the words with difficulty. “I’m afraid.” She gestured weakly toward Wallace. “I wanna gun.…”
Huller stared at Wallace. With his hand falling slowly from sight, he opened the door. “C’mon,” he said to Dotty, his eyes never leaving Wallace’s. “Go on inside,” he said to her. “Let me.…”
“No!” she said, trying to pull back on the door. “I don’t mean that!”
Huller held the door. The dog snuffled and pawed the ground near Huller’s feet. “Doesn’t matter,” Huller said. “Mine or somebody else’s. Either way’s fine with me.”
“I’m tired,” she said. “He’ll be okay. I just gotta sleep.”
“Gimme the keys,” Huller said, reaching past Dotty for them. He came around to Wallace’s door and opened it. “Out!” he said. “C’mon, little man.” He pulled Wallace out and jerked him back against the car. The dog snarled and dove toward Wallace’s feet. Growling, it nipped at his pant legs.
Wallace sank against the car. He wasn’t afraid of the dog. He wasn’t afraid of Huller. He was suddenly very tired.
Huller laughed. He turned and went to his truck, taking from the flat bed a ball of rope, which he unwound. Chuckling to himself, he told Wallace to face the car and put his hands behind his back. With the dog still snarling and nipping, he knotted an end of the cord around Wallace’s wrists; the other, he slung tightly through the thong of the dog’s stiff and shrunken leather collar so that there was no more than a foot of rope between them.
“You won’t have any problems now,” Huller said, laughing, because as the dog twisted and struggled to free itself of the rope, it pulled Wallace, his knees bent and back arched, backward after it.
“Poor old Red,” Huller laughed, and then his face darkened. He leaned close to the dog and scratched its blunt head. “Poor dumb thing. Oughta put them both outta their misery,” he said, with a trace of sadness in his voice.
19
The darkness didn’t matter because she could barely see through her swollen eyes. It was her hands, trembling and graspless, that took so long untying the rope. Released, the dog sank against the door with its drooling muzzle on his paws.
Wallace could feel the animal’s eyes on him through the darkness. Dotty sat propped like a broken doll on her bed. Wallace sat on his bed. From time to time his head bobbed with sleep. Outside, the crickets’ cry thinned.
“I got to sleep,” Dotty said desperately. “I just got to.”
“It’s almost morning,” he said, noting uneasily the lightening sky, down now to one last scrim of gray. His throat hurt when he tried to swallow. Pretty soon, she’d go next door and then, after a little while, the door would open and Huller would tiptoe in and, in that club of a voice he used on the dog, would tell Wallace to turn over and then there would come the shock of cold metal, hard against his temple, the gun barrel dug into that soft, boneless depression he’d always been afraid to press on for fear of injuring his brain, of damaging it any more than the doctors said had already been done at birth.
He had just drifted into sleep when he felt Dotty climb next to him on the bed. She lifted his arm over her shoulder. “I wish I was dead,” she moaned against his throat. “There’s no way out. There’s nothing left, no place to go.”
“Hyacinth got married,” he said suddenly with a note of wonder in his voice at the way it had just dawned on him, had just burst out of him. “I never thought of that, of her getting married,” he said.
“How do you know she is?” she asked, catching a sob in her throat.
“She told me,” he said. “In the phone booth. She said she was Mrs. Hyacinth T. J. P. Farnham.”
“And what’d you say?” She sat up and blew her nose on the corner of the sheet.
“Nothing. I couldn’t think what to say.”
She got up then and stood by the door. The dog scurried to lay between the beds. She was looking at the house. She lit a cigarette, took a few quick puffs, then dropped it on the floor and ground it out with her bare heel. A deep sob rose in her chest, then expired in a small moan. She pushed open the door, then eased it into the frame without its usual bang.
His head hung to one side. He closed his eyes, barely asleep again. His arms were numb and his legs were like metal rods, u
nyielding and cold like the old brace. His breathing seemed to stop and he thought he had been asleep and dreaming for a long time. I been asleep all this time, his voice said. I slept through it all. Canny’s gone and Dotty’s gone and Hyacinth’s gone and so’re them two boys. They’s all gone. And so’re you, the voice kept saying. So’re you.… Gone.…
BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM
He thought he could hear his heart that loud, like a hollow blast. But it wasn’t his heart, because now it was gone. And here he was opening his gummy eyes onto the palest threads of morning light dangling through the thickly twisted trees. On the floor next to him, the dog’s head shot up, and it howled.
“Jest gettin’ up,” Wallace announced, lifting his feet cautiously from the bed. “That’s all,” he said, his hand raised in appeasement. “Jest gettin’ up.…”
From where he sat on the bed, Wallace thought he saw a flash of orange light through the quick-moving shadows of dawn. The dog too had seen it. It started back, then tensed forward in a powerful crouch of still, frozen energy, its taut haunches so ready to spring that its rump trembled and twitched.
Just then, the door flew open and the dog bounded out past Dotty, who ran inside with Canny. Canny wore the same clothes as the night before. Her hair hung in clumps and her tired eyes moved pinkishly behind a dull coating.
“Momma!” she kept saying, trying to get Dotty’s attention. “Momma.…”
“Here!” said Dotty, flipping him the car keys. “I couldn’t find his, dammit. You’ll have to go around the truck.” She ran into the bathroom and came out with her makeup rattling and bundled in a dingy towel.
Even standing still for a moment, she gave the impression of running, lurching. All the crazy disjointed movement was contained in her voice. She seemed to fizz and crackle with energy. Even her wiry hair sputtered with it. A faint charred odor wafted from her.
Outside, the dog continued to bark.
“C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go! Let’s go! Jesus Christ, there’s no time.…”
“Momma!” Canny said, grasping her arm. “What was that noise? They were …”
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