Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Bloody bully.”

  Clarence Wylie said, “I’m a heartless bastard.”

  With a resigned look of obedience, Charlie Galloway climbed slowly upstairs. The upper part of the house contained three small rooms – two bedrooms, one of them for guests and strays, usually Charlie’s inebriated acquaintances, and a bathroom. The larger bedroom was the one he’d shared with Karen. The conjugal bed. If he listened carefully he thought he might hear echoes of love-making and passion and an intimacy that had been richer than anything he’d ever dreamed accessible in his life. And what the hell had he done with it? He’d blown it away like the filaments of a dandelion. No. Why be so damned pastoral? What he’d really achieved was the insane derailment of his marriage, strewing wrecked carriages all along twisted tracks – smoke and glass and a shattered locomotive that had gone completely out of control.

  An unsteadiness seized him in the hallway between bedroom and bath and he lost his balance a moment, lurching against the wall under the place where Karen had hung framed photographs of their life together. Suspended above Galloway in the gloom was pictorial evidence of a wonderful courtship and a wedding, all bright things done in the lacy sunlight of those days of promise.

  In a state of sadness, he slid slowly to the floor, his cheek pressed to the white paintwork. A barb dug deeply into his heart: how had it come to this? He squeezed his eyes tightly shut because what he wanted more than anything else was to cry, to shake himself free of sorrow. But alcohol was always an unhappy tunesmith; melancholy’s piper. You could sit here and wallow for a long time, Charlie. Pain, after all, is a comfort all its own. You sick bastard, what are you?

  He pulled himself up and made it inside the bathroom, black and white squares on the floor and a huge bathtub on paws, a simple sink, a simple mirror. There was no clutter here, nothing that invited you to linger. He undressed, tossed his sweaty clothes on the floor, climbed into the tub and drew the shower-curtain. The water pierced and stung him, revitalising him to a point where the edge of drunkenness was lost, even if he knew it was only a temporary bluntness.

  He decided to shave. A daft undertaking. He razored himself badly, bled into the sink, stuck toilet-paper over the wounds. He doused redness from his eyes with Murine, then brushed his teeth and gargled. What emerged some minutes later, dressed in a clean silk robe, face studded with tiny cuts, looked arguably human.

  He went downstairs. In the kitchen Clarence Wylie had found a jar of instant coffee and two mugs, one of which he pushed toward Galloway.

  “What happened to your face, Charlie?”

  “Failed suicide attempt.”

  Wylie replied with a mild joke. “Couldn’t quite cut it, huh?”

  Galloway smiled politely and peeled the pinkish pieces of paper from his jaw. He reached for the coffee. Already the quick fix of energy from the shower was fading and there was slippage inside him. He’d drifted from his moorings. The coffee was tasteless. It needed something to make it sit up and sing. Vodka. A slug of Gordon’s. He slumped in a chair.

  “Where’s Karen living?” Wylie asked.

  “Now that’s a good question, Clarence. She tells me she moves between friends. It’s her drifting phase.” Galloway pushed the coffee mug aside. He resented the yellow daffodils that decorated it. Drifting phase. “I miss her,” he added, and his voice had a break in it. He looked up at the ceiling, where the fan was still and a spider hung from a blade. “I miss her and I wish to God I knew how to get her back,” and his tone became strident all at once, loud with desperation.

  Wylie gazed across the kitchen, saying nothing. His round, worn face had the contemplative expression of a monk who has encountered too many sorrowful pilgrims. He was a good-natured man who’d asked a sympathetic question. But it was the wrong question at the wrong time, and it had provoked a raw reaction. Galloway had the anaemic, disbelieving look of an earthquake victim who finds his whole world vanished in deep crevices. He picked up his coffee and held it to his lips. His eyes were closed. Steam rose into his lashes.

  “I’m sorry, Clarence. I didn’t mean to shout. I just,” and his voice left him a moment. He pressed his fingertips to his eyelids. “It’s the bloody emptiness. And the ghosts get on my nerves.”

  But you know how to get Karen back, Wylie thought, although he wasn’t about to say so. The last thing Charlie Galloway needed was advice on how to reinstate his marriage. Boozers regarded unsolicited counsel with the scepticism reserved by physicians for psychic healers. And Wylie, wary of setting off more depth-charges, was quiet for a while before he rose from his chair. “I have to go, Charlie.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Charlie said.

  “You don’t need to.”

  Charlie made a small dismissive gesture and opened the door. The least I can do.

  Outside, even the shade beneath the avocado tree had been breached by heat. Every dry leaf appeared to vibrate with its own fiery energy.

  “Now go back to bed, Charlie,” Clarence said. “And stay there. Sleep it off. No booze.” A finger wagged.

  “I will, I will.”

  “I’ll call you later. Just to check in.”

  I bet, Charlie thought. I bet you will.

  Unbalanced, leaning against the door jamb, he watched Wylie, jailer and wet nurse, stroll to the Buick. Behind the wheel Clarence raised a clenched fist in the air, though whether as warning or encouragement it was hard to tell. Charlie observed the car go out of the driveway. How dehydrated he felt! Did Clarence really expect him just to go and lie down in a darkened room like a man with migraine? Wily Wylie surely knew better. It would not be beyond Clarence to wait in some hidden place, concealed inside his sweltering Buick, eyeballing the road for a sign of Charlie scudding off to the nearest liquor store or cocktail bar.

  Galloway was about to close the door when he realised a figure had appeared near the big tree, a woman of about fifty in a white blouse and baggy red shorts. Her head was covered by a large straw hat, her face in shadow. She carried a canvas bag.

  “Ella, how are you?” Galloway asked. He’d forgotten it was Tuesday and that she came every week, same day, same time.

  The small Filipina woman approached the doorway, wiped a hand across her damp forehead. She set the canvas bag down. It contained her cleaning materials, jars of this, bottles of that, rags that smelled of furniture polish. She didn’t drive. Wherever she had to go she walked or rode a bus. Galloway, who was very fond of Ella Nazarena – indeed had come to consider her a family member, a favourite aunt – felt sorry for her in this weather. He had the urge to hug her. Some quality about her always unleashed in him a profound sympathy. She made him wish he was filthy rich and could transform her life with a shower of coins – here, Ella, sit down, take the weight off your life, relax, no more hard miserable work for you, my dear. He gazed at the religious symbols round her neck, a crucifix, a St Francis, and some other saint he didn’t recognise.

  “Mrs Galloway is back?” she asked. She must have been very pretty once, Galloway thought. Sometimes when she smiled there was a pale flash of an old beauty and the black-brown eyes suggested a tamped-down fire. It was as if a spectre of a former self still occupied the body.

  Galloway shook his head. He was distracted by wondering if there was anything in the house to drink. Something stashed. Something he’d planked away.

  Mrs Nazarena said, “Too bad. Don’t give up hope. One day soon, huh? She will come home. She loves you. You love her. It works out in God’s own time. It always does.”

  The woman’s simple faith often dumbfounded Galloway. She perceived a logic in God, a balance. God kept the ledgers and everything came out right in the end. A joyful accounting. This uncomplicated belief that sustained her wouldn’t have belonged in the Scottish kirks of Charlie’s childhood, which tended to be cheerless places designed by men who thought the road to heaven was John Knox Avenue, a gloomy thoroughfare little used. The notion of happiness in religion, if you were a Presbyterian, belonged only
to pagans and holy rollers. He remembered trembling a great deal as a boy, appalled by the roar of a certain Reverend McNab, a bony white giant in a high pulpit who offered his congregation either a living hell or a dead one. The minister made Charlie feel guilty of something, only he wasn’t sure what. As for grace, which McNab referred to always in the sly whisper of a car salesman with a lemon to get off his hands, that concept eluded Charlie entirely except as the name of a girl who sat in front of him at school and had very big purplish ears.

  “You still want me to work today?” Ella asked.

  “Of course. The house needs you. I need you. Where would I be without you?” He smiled at her. His affection for her had stemmed originally from a sense they shared of exile from their native countries. Sometimes, when she reminisced about the Philippines, when she remembered a landscape of lagoons where the water, she said, was God’s own idea of blue, or valleys so green they suggested the very first hour of creation, when she talked of the wondrous rice terraces of northern Luzon, Galloway became her fellow conspirator in nostalgic attachments to faraway lands where they’d each left the most important parts of themselves. He spoke to her of the rocky Western Islands set in savage black tides, the lonesome greenery of the Borders, mystic Glasgow on a long white summery night. They understood each other’s longings.

  Once, in a mood of drunken benevolence, he’d danced for her his version of the Highland Fling, arms upraised over his head, feet daringly light – a darting, laughing performance during which he’d caught her round the waist and spun her until she was breathless. At the end of the dance he tried to tell her that in the interests of authenticity he should have worn a kilt, a garment he couldn’t altogether explain to her. A skirt? Sort of, Ella. But not really. She’d said the word kilt to herself several times, a new discovery.

  Later, she told him she’d looked up Scotland in a world atlas at the public library, and for some reason this touched him so much that he reciprocated, studying a map of the Philippines and finding Ella Nazarena’s province among a multitude of exotic islands littered in the South China Sea like so many cookie crumbs. He’d taught her some good Glasgow words, like dreich and bauchle and pokey-hat, and in return he’d learned salámat and paálam and kumustá. Theirs was a relationship less of employer and minion than of equals, involving tiny moments of yearning and some of raucous laughter.

  “You no work today?” she asked.

  “Not today.”

  “Suspended again?”

  Galloway nodded quickly, glossing over the humiliating matter of his unemployment, then stepped back into the blessed shade of the house. In the direct glare of the sun he’d begun to feel like flimsy paper placed beneath a magnifying glass to curl blackly and smoulder until total cremation.

  Mrs Nazarena, her face creased by years of monotonous domestic chores in the canyons of Los Angeles, picked up her bag and followed Galloway inside. “How long suspended this time?”

  “Three months.”

  “Without pay?”

  “Without pay.”

  “Bad news.” She frowned, bit her lip, then turned her head to the side as if she didn’t want to look him directly in the eye. She smells it on me, he thought. The sulphuric perfume of drunken loneliness. But then he realised it was more, that the woman had something on her mind she wanted to say only she wasn’t sure how.

  Had he forgotten to pay her? Did he owe her? No, it was more than that. If it had been back pay she would have said so without hesitation. There was an element in her manner he’d never seen before. Fear? Maybe that was too strong. He wasn’t sure. Sun and booze had melted his antennae. All the messages that came to him were scrambled in transmission.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “Yes. I think so.” She looked bone-weary, puckered by heat and depression. “Maybe something bad.”

  “If you’ve got a problem, Ella, I might be able to help.”

  Mrs Nazarena said, “Maybe later. I think it over. Will you call me tonight?”

  “Whatever suits you, Ella. Just remember. Anything I can do. Anything …”

  “Salámat.”

  He wondered what Ella could possibly have in mind. Maybe something bad. Did she know somebody in trouble with the law? Had one of her many relatives done something illegal? But how could he possibly help anyone in his present condition? Dear God. His skull ached. He said he was going up to his room, mumbling something about a nap as he headed, in an uncertain manner, toward the staircase, which appeared unusually steep, peculiarly angled, strange.

  “I try to be quiet as I can,” Ella called after him.

  She stacked dishes in the dish-washer. She sprayed the ceramic work surfaces with Glass Plus, which she wiped off, then she tackled the inside of the oven. God only knew what Mr Galloway had been eating since Karen had gone; the bottom of the oven was covered with blackened blisters, burnt warts of spilled food that had baked on the enamel. She worked on these for a time with Oven-Off, then cleaned the inside of the microwave where streaks of tomato pulp adhered to the glass. It looked like chicken cacciatore had exploded.

  The trapped heat of the house tired her quickly. She drank cold water and went inside the living-room. She sat down on the edge of the sofa, balanced in the manner of an uneasy guest. She’d worked six years for the Galloways and they always treated her well, more like a friend than housekeeper. Some of her employers scarcely noticed her presence. Some hardly even spoke to her except to issue commands. They were princesses, their houses kingdoms to be ruled. The Galloways were different. They were human. They had no pretensions, no airs and graces.

  She knew Charlie was basically a good man who had his problems. One afternoon she’d found him fully clothed and fast asleep inside the bathtub and Mrs Galloway had said Leave him right there, Ella, let the bastard sleep it off. It was only natural for Karen to express herself with anger at times. Life with Charlie was no day at the beach, after all. But Karen wasn’t the kind of woman who could stay enraged for long. Her heart was too big for that. Too big for grudges, for weights.

  Mrs Nazarena had absolutely no doubt the Galloways loved each other. She knew love when she saw it. But sometimes love alone wasn’t strong enough to hold things together. You needed to work hard, and be considerate, and if you were Charlie Galloway you needed above all else to get rid of the weakness that was killing you slowly.

  And amen, she thought.

  She took her rosary from the pocket of her shorts. The feel of the plain wooden beads comforted her. She closed her eyes and wondered if she’d done the right thing by approaching Mr Galloway. It hadn’t come easily. Last night, when she considered it for the hundredth time, she’d been unable to sleep. Besides, the packs of stray dogs that roamed the neighbourhood had been especially active and noisy. There were so many vicious strays now that people had taken to shooting them. Around two a.m. she’d risen to take a sleeping-pill. While she waited for the narcotic to affect her, she sat for a long time at the kitchen window and watched the broken-down house across the narrow street where the muscular young man called Luke worked all night long on the motorcycles in his garage. The moon, she recalled, had been coppery with freeway fumes, the night hot and loud, police sirens in the next street, an ambulance cutting through the dark, kids partying along the block, and the dogs, always the dogs.

  Was it right or wrong to bring the problem to Mr Galloway? Why should he take on the ligalit, the worry of somebody else? He had enough troubles of his own. But something bad was going on, something that would lead to violence. She hated violence. Even if it was around her all the time, she’d never become immune to it. The notion of one human being inflicting injury or death on another was inconceivable to her. Her life was tempered by mercy.

  She didn’t want to go to some unfamiliar cop. She trusted Charlie Galloway. He wouldn’t expose her. If she showed him Cara’s letter which contained the bad news, he’d act with discretion. She was sure of that.

  Maybe she should have
kept her mouth shut and not bothered him. Dear Jesus, she said to herself, help me. Open my eyes and make me see. Show me the right thing. I am your willing subject, guide me.

  She got up from the sofa with some effort, moaning softly. Increasingly these days she was inconvenienced by muscular pains in the back of her legs, but the medication she’d been prescribed killed more than-the pain, it made her mind freeze and she forgot things and sometimes she would stop moving because she couldn’t remember where she was headed in any case. She often felt as if she was suspended in mid-air.

  She polished the living-room table. She sang quietly as she worked, because it made the labour easier. She had a good clear voice, younger than her years. When she reached the line about troubles melting like lemon drops, she stopped.

  She saw her face look up from the gleaming surface of the table. Thirty years ago, before she’d emigrated, she’d been the prettiest girl in her barangay in Benguet Province. Dozens of men, not only from her own barangay but from other districts, had wanted her. She’d chosen Luiz, the one she considered the brightest, the strongest. In 1960 he had brought her to Los Angeles where he’d worked in the construction industry. One morning scaffolding collapsed and buried him and it had taken too long to get him out. They rushed him to a hospital.

  DOA, they told her. Tough break. Very tough. In full settlement of the construction company’s liabilities, she’d accepted a cheque for thirty-five hundred dollars. She’d signed a paper, and the company’s youthful lawyer – a smooth boy blemished only by a pimple on his forehead; she’d never forget that red zit – had smiled with confidence and charm, and that was the end of it. A cheque came in the mail two days afterwards.

  Years later she learned she might have sued for many thousands, perhaps a million dollars, but she’d signed that opportunity away because she hadn’t understood the system, how America worked, how big corporations knew all the ways to cheat poor people. There was no more money to be had from Luiz’s death. She spent almost all the thirty-five hundred on his funeral expenses. What she had left over was enough to buy a twenty-dollar medallion of St Rose of Lima, patroness of the Philippines, and a black coat and hat for the church service.