Flight to Darkness

by Gil Brewer

  “Mrs. Garth?”

  “Yes. Your brother’s wife.”

  So here it was. Not sharp—dull realization and finality. Almost relief, maybe. The sudden sickness was almost nepenthe. Leda and certainty.

  “Here she is now,” the doctor said.

  A yellow convertible was speeding up the drive, flashing through patches of sunlight and shade like the revolving blades of an electric fan. A woman was at the wheel.

  The car stopped behind the doctor’s. The woman stepped from the car and my heart rocked then. She wore white shorts and a fuzzy white short-sleeved sweater.

  Frank was in the doorway. He didn’t look at me, but he had washed up and he had a on a clean shirt. The mess he’d made in the front hall was gone. Frank’s face was badly bruised and his lip was cut and swollen.

  “Frank!” she said, seeing his face. “Frank. What’s going on?”

  Sunlight streamed on her as she came up the steps. Everything went out of me, even knowing. I hadn’t believed. It hadn’t been what it was, even knowing. Knowing all these months. Sure of something like this, yet denying it.

  Inside I turned to mush, swearing all the time that it wasn’t so and knowing it was. Leda.

  She paused. I hadn’t moved, the muscles in the backs of my legs went so rigid they ached. She paused for only a second, not smiling, just seeing me and telling me to shut up, be still, with her eyes gray and abrupt. It was like looking into burned-out twilight—seeing the night back there. Everything went foggy. I heard Frank speaking as I moved away.

  “Leda,” he said. “Leda, Mother died. You see who’s come home? It’s Eric.” He glanced toward me, his voice scornful. “You remember Eric, don’t you?”

  “Frank,” she said. “Darling.”

  I walked across the gallery through the crazy impossible dream. The dream I had tried to deny. I was tired and sick. I didn’t look back.

  “Mother’s dead,” Frank said. Bantram cleared his throat.

  I went down the steps into the crazy but calm sunlight that bit like white ice through the shade.

  Leda Thayer was not alone. I had found her. She hadn’t just vanished—hadn’t just run off. She was my brother’s wife—wife to wealth.

  I wanted to run. It was all I could do to walk through the silent afternoon.

  Chapter 12

  I walked straight on across the lawn until I reached the main beach road. I didn’t look back. There was every reason why I should have remained at the house. I couldn’t. I hated Frank’s guts for what he’d done to Mother. There was no point in saying, “If—” because the deed was done.

  I turned back off the beach road and went to the car. It was like walking through smoke. And I couldn’t face Frank. Not with Leda. God, I thought, Leda is here. She didn’t vanish. She just came home. She’s right here. It was like seeing the back of your head in a mirror.

  Leda. Frank’s wife. It was unbelievable, yet true. She hadn’t really even recognized me. It was taking a long time to sink in. She had married Franklin Garth. She had married a half million dollars and my brother, who wasn’t even my brother, after all.

  “Leda, you see who’s come home? It’s Eric.”

  Yes, she remembered, all right.

  But that one look at her had turned the trick. I wanted her.

  Breaking into a run, I tried to push the afternoon’s events out of my mind. It was impossible. I wanted to leave Cypress Landing right away. I knew I wouldn’t.

  As I climbed into the car, it was like finding the home ground they talk about; it was like grabbing hold of God’s beard and saying, “Maybe I don’t rate, but give me a chance, just for the hell of it, will you?”

  Leda. Why? Leda, why?

  There was one large room in the barn extending clear beyond the rafters to the large skylight. The other two rooms were more or less catchalls, though one was used as a kitchen and the other had a bed in it.

  The windows—large ones I had put in myself years ago—had all been shuttered, but now the shutters were open, and entering the back door into the kitchen, I smelled meat frying.

  Norma was nowhere in sight. There were chops in the frying pan on the wood stove. There was also a pan of German raw fries.

  “Anybody home?” I called.

  Norma came through the door leading into the studio.

  “Hi,” she said. “You were gone a long time.”

  She was a mess. She’d changed to dungarees and one of my t-shirts, resurrected from a box of old clothes. She was dirt and dust from head to toe. She dangled a filthy rag in one hand and a ragged broom in the other. Her face was smudged with black streaks and cobwebs spun in silvered clots from her bright blonde hair.

  “Gorgeous,” I said. “Absolutely gorgeous.”

  She smiled and wiped her face with the dustcloth. It had a startling effect.

  “I figured the place might need some cleaning up some.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “The pussycats get me. I never saw so many in my life.” She paused slightly excited, waved the broom toward the studio. She had sobered up. “You should see ’em,” she said. “Pussycats all over the place. Thousands.” She beamed happily and my insides snarled up. “I got most of ’em, though.”

  “Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, pussycats? We got a menagerie?” All I could think of was hundreds of cats running around the barn. “What’d you do with ’em?”

  She started to laugh, waved the cloth, choked on the dust, then said, “You don’t understand. Come here.”

  I followed her into the studio cluttered with modeling stands, racked tools, chisels, mallets, completed and half-completed statues, statuettes, and other forgotten odds and ends. Also there were crates and boxes of stuff I’d sent home for storage here.

  “Well,” I said to Norma. “Show me.” I felt fine, all right. Just fine. And this kid had gone ahead believing things possible even in the face of disbelief. Leda. Wait until Norma saw Leda. Lots of people put imaginary guns against their heads. I’d pulled the trigger six times in the last few minutes. Then I realized that wasn’t the way. I threw the gun out the window.

  Norma bent behind a battered, frazzled upholstery couch, came up with a large puff of dust and cobwebs which clung together.

  “There,” she said. “See? Pussycats.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “There aren’t many left,” she told me. “But it was fun while it lasted.”

  “All right,” I said. “You’d make a good wife.”

  She swallowed. “How’s your mother?”

  I tried to explain what had happened without making it sound too terrible.

  Her sympathy was genuine. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You came back at a bad time. I’m really sorry, Eric.”

  “Yes. Everything’s happened at once.”

  “Oh?”

  I walked across the studio, unwound a rope from a wall bracket and let down the trap that covered the skylight. Turning, I said, “There was a woman, Norma. You were right.”

  “Oh.”

  “She vanished for a while. I didn’t know where she was.”

  “I see.”

  “She’s married my brother.”

  Norma dropped her pussycat, leaned the broom against the wall, hung the dustcloth over it. “Think I’d better watch those chops for supper,” she said. She moved quickly into the kitchen.

  I followed her. “Did you hear what I said? This women, she’s my brother’s wife. She’s living right there.”

  “Don’t you think I’m good, though?” Norma said. “I went down the road to the store and bought all this for supper. So we can eat, you know? You wouldn’t have anything to eat here, if I hadn’t—restaurants are probably—”

  “Okay. Forget it.”

  She didn’t answer. She made a great clattering at the stove. Then she turned quickly and looked at me. “Eric. I’m sorry. About everything. Especially about your mother.”

  I went back into the studio and closed th
e door.

  The homecoming of Eric Garth, I thought quietly.

  It was easy enough to say Mother would have died anyway, that the doctor was sure she couldn’t last much longer, that her heart was barely beating. Only I found myself blaming myself for that, too. If I hadn’t come, it might not have happened. The old magnificent “if.”

  Don’t be stupid. It would have happened anyway.

  Frank should have kept his mouth closed. But that was his way. Anything to grandstand.

  So he had the business, the money, the house, the woman. I picked up a dried-out, half-finished image of a clay woman clinging to an old armeture and hurled it base and all across the room. It shattered against a post. I felt all the hate boiling up inside me and I wished I’d really broken Frank like that piece of clay. I could do it.

  I had to see Leda. . . .

  “That Lenny Conn is here.”

  I turned, breathing hard, trying to control myself. Norma stood in the doorway. She watched me for a moment, frowning. “He’s been drinking. I wouldn’t let him in.”

  “You wouldn’t—good. Don’t, damn it. No—go ahead.” I ceased. Lenny Conn pushed by Norma and strode grinning into the room.

  He had a white face that looked slick. It should have been tanned because most of the years I knew of his life had been spent in the sun. But slugs don’t tan, even if they sometimes crawl from under their logs into the sunlight.

  “Eric, by God. Had to get over. Heard you was back from the wars.” His mouth dangled open and his wily pale eyes searched the area just above my left shoulder. He never looked you in the eye. He whirled sharply, stuck a long pale thumb into Norma’s ribs. “Ol’ gal, here, still beatin’ the shady’s for you, hey?” He jerked away, saying to Norma, “Don’t get me wrong, now.”

  “Hello, Lenny.”

  Norma went back into the kitchen.

  “You been a heller, ain’t you?”

  “Not much. I see you’ve turned a leaf.”

  He looked down at himself, stretched an arm out and half-drunkenly inspected the sleeve of his fawn-colored tropical worsted suit. He wore a nylon shirt which was soaking wet with sweat—disproving their coolness—and which was buttoned, without tie, at the throat. The wings on the collar of the shirt were about a hand and a half long. One wrinkled outside his jacket collar, the other crumbled in a wad beneath. The shirt was pink.

  Lenny was built like a bear and he wore clothes like a bear might. His hair was a scraggled mass of yellow curls and his pale-lipped smile revealed a string of even gray teeth, which lapped slightly like shingles on the roof of an old barn. They may or may not have had moss along their edges. He hadn’t changed except for the clothes and a new flaunting air.

  “I done fair,” he said.

  “How?”

  He winked. When he winked he showed you the shingle teeth and lifted one shoulder. He covered the wink quickly, though. “Ain’t so shiftless no more. Hit’s only right a man should make his way in this here world. I fished and gigged my way into the upper brackets, Eric. Bought a car an’ hired me a Negro to run the boat an’ do the work. I just sit.” His laugh was wind with phlegm in it.

  “How’s the collection? Any new specimens?”

  He glanced with terrific furtiveness toward the kitchen doorway, took a sidewise step toward me. “A few new pippens!”

  “Good.”

  “One would get you right,” he said. “The lady’s in the papers ever day. Whyn’t you come over an’ have a peek?”

  I had no intention of going to Lenny’s place to see his collection of nude pictures and statues, even though some of them were of extremely prominent women, actresses and the like, who had used Pullman trains when Lenny was around.

  “Sorry, I’m busy,” I said.

  He was downhearted. But only for a moment. Lenny’s emotions were of short duration.

  “Heered yo’ maw died.”

  “Yeah. Look, Lenny, I’m busy.” He had heard quickly.

  “That’s all right. I reckon we all busy.” He stood there, looking quite drunk and utterly lost. “See Frank an’ his new one right often.”

  “Did you want anything, Lenny? I’m really busy.”

  “Now you bring it up, I reckon I do.” He moved across the room, padding quietly, halted before an old statue of a woman’s torso in a fashion I’d once thought powerful. It was the one of Venus that Norma said she’d seen Lenny watching through the window.

  “Like this here thing,” Lenny said. “What you asking for hit?”

  I sighed. “What’ll you offer?”

  He tightened his lips. It was a job. “Fi’ dollars.”

  I tightened mine. “It’s yours.”

  Between the two of us we got the statue into Lenny’s car, with Lenny bubbling slightly in his throat over his new prize. The car was a Packard, a couple of years old, convertible, painted a bright and unblemished scarlet.

  He started to get in, then said, “Oh, most forgot.”

  “Yes?”

  “Miss Leda—she asted me to tell you something.”

  I didn’t say anything. So he knew Leda.

  “I an’ Miss Leda’s good friends.”

  “Fine.”

  “She says to tell you she wants to see you. Says, ‘Lenny, tell Eric I’m miserable.’ Says, ‘Tell Eric I got to see him right away.’” Lenny paused, rubbed his nose sharply upward with the heel of his hand. “Leda’s right nice, now, ain’t she?”

  I thanked him and watched him drive off. Venus sat beside him, mute and quite unconcerned over any fate which might be in store for her.

  I suddenly felt like a camel drinking water after he’d crossed the Sahara. Word of Leda did that to me. I stood there watching the smoking dust of Lenny’s car whirl down the roadway and vanish on the main road.

  Another car’s engine starting, whirled me around. I was just in time to see Norma’s steady face as she drove by. She said nothing and she drove fast. Likely she’d overheard the conversation.

  I went on inside and walked to the studio. I looked up at the skylight. The glass was as fogged as the inside of my head. My chest felt as though it was in a vise with somebody slowly turning the handle so my breath came shorter and shorter until I might not be able to breathe at all.

  Leda. I could feel her skin against my palms, see her eyes spinning down there in the darkness, hear her heart beating and smell the wild uprush of memory.

  I stood there for quite a time, listening to myself think. Finally, I walked back through the kitchen and out the rear door. Just as I closed the door a car rumbled swiftly down the sand road leading to the barn.

  This time it was another convertible, with the top down. It was Leda at the wheel, her auburn hair gleaming in the myriad-hued sunset in the western sky above the Gulf. The car slid to a stop and she sat there watching me as I slowly walked toward her.

  “Hello, Eric,” she said. “I came as quickly as I could.”

  Chapter 13

  This was fine. Now that I had her here within reach there was nothing I could think of to say. Or whatever I did think, I couldn’t say. She wasn’t long on talk at that moment, either.

  “Eric,” she said.

  I looked at the car, the sky, the long stretch of sand road and browned waist-high grass, the trees, and beyond them the faint line of bayou showing between patches of Spanish moss. But my gaze always came back to her. She wore the same white shorts and halter, her hair was windblown, her wide, full-lipped mouth damp and red, her eyes bright and impatient. She smiled, her teeth gleaming strong and white. “Why don’t you say something, Eric?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s wear that record out.”

  The smile went away, she moved her legs, undid the top button on the halter. The shorts were very short, her legs very long, and there were only two buttons on the halter.

  “Get in the car,” she said. “We’ll go some place.”

  I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The lush, graceful lines of her body beneath h
er tight clothing shaped up inside me. My hands began to tremble; I rammed them into my pockets.

  Her eyes were troubled now. She brushed soft thick hair away from her forehead, flicked her tongue across her lips, took a deep breath. That did it. I was half-afraid now, then slow anger knotted inside me.

  “I’m humble,” she said. “I’ve come to you.” she looked straight into my eyes, and her own softened as she shook her head. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” She lowered her voice. “I thought I was being smart, selling your car, pulling a stunt like this. I was afraid maybe, too. Only more just being smart. Only I’ve hurt myself early. Your brother went overboard all the way up there in Alabama, Eric. But I only hurt myself. I can’t stand it, Eric.” Her tone went slightly shrill. “I need you. I’ve needed you ever since I left. I was insane, not you. You’ve got to help me.” She paused, her hands gripping the steering wheel. “That last day with you, at the sanitarium. Oh, God, I was mad. I’d just left your brother. That’s why I was like that, so I couldn’t—”

  “You’re my brother’s wife.”

  “You love me, Eric. I know you do. And I love you. Our plans. You’ve got to help. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. And your friend Lenny told me your story. Said you wanted to see me. But you’re married, and that’s that. Did Lenny show you his collection?”

  She ignored it, but her eyes flashed. “Frank won’t divorce me, won’t let me do a thing. I’ve tried everything. Can’t even get it annulled, because . . .”

  “You’ve got what you wanted.” I suddenly wanted to hurt her as she had hurt me, make her cry for it, and then not give in to her. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You’ve got to help me.” Excitement came into her voice now and her eyes began to burn. She spoke rapidly, leaning toward me now, and I could smell her perfume, and the excitement and the memories crowded in. “Listen, Eric. I lay awake thinking, remembering. It can’t have been so short a time, all this has happened. He’s not like you, nobody’s like you. I’ve got to—” She bit her lower lip, then went on. “I’ve got to be with you. I’m not going to hold back, damn it, Eric. We know each other too well for that. I go crazy every time I think of you.”