Voices in the Dark

by Andrew Coburn

  “I prefer you don’t,” Gunner said sternly.

  “It’s my room, you smoke all you want,” his mother said in the instant, her chin held high with an authority never exerted in her marriage. Isabel lit up, and he drew in his chins with a shiver of disgust. His mother’s eyes flared. “You going to die on the spot? Look at him, Isabel. I had him too late in life. I never should’ve had him at all.”

  He read his watch, his mother’s voice drilling a hole in his head.

  “Your last-born, Isabel, how old were you?”

  “I don’t think it matters, dear.”

  “Of course it matters. Look what you’re saddled with. The devil put a mark on her face.”

  Isabel Williams blew smoke. “Let’s leave my Mary out of it.”

  Gunner felt himself gagging on the smoke. His rise from the chair took stupendous effort, which stained his cheeks. Both women were gazing at him with what could only be taken as mockery. “Is there anything you need?” he asked.

  “Don’t talk nonsense. Everything I need is here, I have only to snap my fingers. Here we’re queens, aren’t we, Isabel?”

  “We’re fucking beauties,” Isabel said.

  When he leaned forward to kiss his mother, her head butted up and struck him. “No, you don’t!” she said.

  His exit was ten minutes on the dot. Reaching the stairway, he ignored the nymphs and gripped the banister, which almost slid away from him. His descent was cautious. At the bottom, Mrs. Nichols’s eyeglasses refracted light.

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Gunner? You don’t look well.”

  He said, “When is she going to die?”

  “That’s rather up to her,” Mrs. Nichols said.

  • • •

  Chief Morgan drove to Boston, to State Street, a funnel made miniscule by towering office buildings in which, he suspected, the world was governed. He pulled into a lot, where the attendant, whipping cars around like toys, paused to take his money. Minutes later, escaping the heat of the street, he passed through glass doors that had opened for him, padded over marble in his soft loafers, and at a bank of elevators stood among men in traditional custom suits of varying sobriety. No one glanced at him. It was as if he were not there.

  He rode the elevator to a lofty height and stepped out into a reception area, where glass reflected him kindly but obscurely. A woman with stiff features but a pleasing voice took his name, spoke into a telephone, and then, looking up, said, “Yes, he’ll see you.” Another woman, her hair drawn in a chignon, showed him the way.

  Harley Bodine’s office was elegantly spare and chaste, with a single piece of artwork on the wall and a great window that seemed level with the sky. Morgan almost expected to meet the eye of God. He was not asked to sit. Bodine came forward in the splendid fit of a suit that matched those of the men at the elevators. “My wife mentioned a picture,” he said in a brisk voice, and Morgan passed it over. Bodine stared at it intently. “This person knows something about my son’s death?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Bodine gave the picture a last look and returned it. “I’ve never seen him before. Who is he?”

  “He calls himself Dudley, that’s all I know. I picked him up for vagrancy.”

  “How stable is he?”

  “Not very, but he knew your son wore braces. The picture the papers ran didn’t show that.”

  “What else about my son?”

  “That’s all he would say.”

  Bodine’s eyes were thrusts of ice returning nothing, and his tone of voice possessed the same cold quality. “What do you think he’s holding back?”

  “At this point I don’t know.”

  “You’re quite right about the newspapers, Chief, but you’ve forgotten television. My son had little to smile about, but occasionally he did. The picture used on Channel Seven, eleven o’clock news, clearly showed the braces. How seriously do you take this man?”

  Morgan faltered, wondering whether he was scraping air, questioning his own competence.

  “Is he playing you for a fool?”

  “That’s crossed my mind.”

  “Have you told me everything?”

  “Yes,” Morgan lied. “I may have overreacted.”

  “Are you playing me for a fool?”

  The air had altered between them. Morgan’s smile was incongruous, accidental, transitory. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Why have you involved yourself? What’s your interest?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “How far does your job go?” Bodine’s white teeth glared between thin lips, and in the instant he no longer seemed of sound mind. “I’ll make it plain. Are you screwing my wife?”

  Guilt strained Morgan’s face, for the answer was Many times in fantasy. “No, sir,” he said, feeling absurd.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” Morgan said. “The man claims he kills children.”

  • • •

  Dudley’s state of mind was not good. His hands shook. His breakfast, eaten too fast, threatened to come up. Lying on the cot, the pillow doubled under his head, he scarcely responded when the woman with pony teeth asked whether he wanted an aspirin. Her face was fussed up for him. “Is it your bowels?” she asked solicitously, and he said, “No, I’ve had my poops.” She lingered outside the cell, eyeing him with concern. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked, and he told her not to worry, it comes and goes.

  “What does?”

  “Me,” he said.

  The fan kept him cool. Closing his eyes, he slipped into an air pocket of a past kept alive by a false sun, a protected place where long-ago voices rang, clocks ticked without moving their hands, and he was his mother’s pet and his father’s pride. He was curls, ruffles, and short pants and kept his bottle until he was four and his teddy much longer. His mother used spit to clean the corners of his mouth. His father fixed his wee-wee when the skin stuck. The town was Exeter, the world at war. His father said he was going to kill Hitler, but Hitler killed him.

  He opened his eyes when the sergeant they called Eugene brought him lunch, a chef’s salad he nibbled at before pushing it aside and returning his head to the pillow. He was eight when he and his mother moved from Exeter to Boston, the part called Dorchester, where families lived on top of one another in four-deckers, which he had never seen before. Nor had he seen before so many women wearing kerchiefs and dungarees and holding babies. Overheard women’s matters filled his ears: the whispers about cramps, the revelations of pregnancies, the asides about birth. “You’re the spit and image of your father,” his mother told him, but it was her spit on his face.

  He was thrust into a strange public school, a brick building with no grass around it, no drawings taped to the classroom walls. He developed a crush on the girl seated beside him and exposed himself to gain her attention. The girl immediately told the teacher, an aggressive slip of a woman who summoned him to the front and announced to the class: “Dudley has something to show us.”

  His eyes fluttered open at a sound outside the cell. “You’re back,” a woman said through the bars. She was the one who had visited him once before, with hair that looked as if it had just come out of curlers. It still looked that way. The padlock and chain disturbed her. “If they’re not treating you right, let me know,” she said, and he nodded, his heart beating hard, people caring for him. She was on her way to the library and offered to bring back books. “What’s your preference?” she asked, and he named a children’s book, which surprised her. “Really?”

  “I don’t know your name,” he said.

  “May,” she said.

  “May,” he repeated. “It’s almost Mary but not quite.”

  His classmates had been bullies, and Sweeney with a big moon face was the worst. In daily acts of terror, Sweeney bent his arm back, jabbed his privates, extorted his milk money, stomped his lunch box, and defaced his books. Cruelest of all, Sweeney stole his cat. In
the backyard he saw the calico hanging from a crude gallows that brought a scream to his lips and his mother to the window. His mother did her best, but the only comfort came from his teddy bear, which he hid under his jacket when she took him to the child psychologist, who gave him crayons and paper and told him to draw. Afterward, an ear to the door, he heard that the boiling purple sun he had drawn was rage and betrayal felt from his father’s death. The puny stick figure snared in tendrils was his own insufficient self with nowhere to grow.

  A sound stirred him, and through his eyelashes he discerned the gaunt figure of the reverend, who was offering him something through the bars. His stomach was better, his hands steady, and he pulled himself up. The peach was a hybrid, no fuzz, and he polished it with his palms. “How much of me is real?” he asked. “Can you guess?”

  “It would be a wild one,” Reverend Stottle replied. “We are, all of us, Stardust.”

  He nibbled. “Why are you staring?”

  “I’m trying to understand you.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s my business.”

  “I wasn’t born, Reverend. I was a trick out of a magician’s hat, a card drawn from my father’s sleeve.”

  “Are you lonesome?”

  “Not very.”

  The reverend said, “How are you, May? Is that for him?”

  He finished the peach and deposited the stone in his breast pocket. Wiping his hands on his jeans, he accepted the book and carried it to the cot, his touch respectful as he flipped pages. The print was large, and the illustrations of Jerry Muskrat and Jumper the Hare were in color. He pressed the open book to his face and breathed deeply, inhaling his childhood. He had no fear of Sweeney, whose name was etched on a tombstone. The dead sink into the depths or float off into the universe — either way they’re gone for good.

  May Hutchins said, “When you finish it, I’ll bring you another.”

  “This will do,” he said.

  • • •

  Looking in on her daughter, Regina Smith presented an intense face at odds with itself, arguments going on behind the dark eyes, nothing resolved, as the keen cut of the mouth vividly showed. Patricia was painting her nails, the fingers done, a few toes to go. Stepping over the threshold, Regina said, “Time we talked, young lady.”

  “Please, Mom, not again. We went through it yesterday.” Patricia spoke over a raised knee, her lashes lowered, her concentration on her foot. “Nothing happened.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion. God knows, you have enough of them.” She had on a camisole top and string bikini briefs. Her beauty was undeniable.

  “What you’re wearing’s hardly decent,” Regina said with a sense of frustration while breathing in too much scent. You could cut it with a knife. “I don’t want you walking around the house that way.”

  “I don’t see what you’re so upset about. Tony’s my brother.”

  “Your stepbrother. That’s a world of difference, as you know very well.”

  “You’re making too much of it.” Bending her head, her raven hair cascading, she blew on her toes and then rose with a suppleness seen only in the young. “And you always have.”

  Regina watched her angle to the dresser with a movement of her buttocks no man would ever ignore, her body a bright thing framed in sunlight from the window. This was her only child, her only recompense from a marriage in which she had been deceived from the start. She said, “I won’t tolerate him in your room.”

  “Okay, I hear you.” Patricia squirmed into designer jeans, a yank needed to force them over the flare of her hips. The cutting teeth of the zipper nearly nipped bare skin. “You ought to ease up, Mom. Trust me, for God’s sake.”

  She left her daughter’s bedroom and traveled the distance to her stepson’s room, where she stepped into the screech of a rock singer, savage to her ear, an affront to her sensibilities. Anthony killed the stereo in the instant, which did not appease her. A rumpled sheet trailed off the bed, and soiled socks and a stained jockstrap lay on the floor, another affront. She could see into his bathroom. The toilet seat had been left up, and a towel festooned the tank. She regarded him silently, with the frozen lips of a statue. “Sorry,” he said and began to pick up.

  “Look at me,” she said, and he unfolded from a crouch, his height exceeding hers, his uncut hair hanging in his face. “No more lies, Anthony. They taint your tongue, make your breath bad.”

  He wore a loose shirt over ballooning slacks that tapered to his slim naked feet. With both hands he palmed his hair back. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The truth about yesterday.”

  “I swear, we were just talking.”

  She had practice looking a liar in the eye. Her first husband had been one. “This is not something I want to discuss with your father,” she said. “Don’t force me to.”

  “We didn’t do anything.”

  “If I learn otherwise,” she said, “you’re gone.”

  • • •

  Mary Williams read some Flaubert to Soldier and then a meaningful scene out of D. H. Lawrence. “I don’t need to be put in the mood,” he said. “I’m already there.”

  An undertow of melancholy threatened to carry her away, but a sense of absurdity, perhaps her own, held her steady. Putting the book down, she asked, “Whom would you want, Madame Bovary or Lady Chatterley?”

  “Both, same time,” he said with a growing hoarseness. “Three-way snarl.”

  “That’s greedy.”

  “It’s interesting.”

  He spoke from a chair, she from the bed, the bottom sheet bared. Between them, a shaft of sunlight swirled with motes of dust like a universe in miniature, all the principles intact. She raised an arm as if to feel on her hand the breath of God guiding the debris. Soldier took it as a gesture to him and uncurled from the chair, aroused before he touched her, ready before she was willing or able. Her arms were rigid, her torso the white of a lunar moth.

  Her mind slipped to other things, to strip poker at summer camp, where other girls had conspired to get her naked first, her shyness part of the allure, her humiliation measured into the fun. An older girl snared the moment with a camera, the picture later bandied about, last seen among the kitchen workers.

  Soldier said, “You’re not with it.”

  “I will be,” she promised, remembering icy jewelry worn by her mother, lush welcomings from her grandmother, and wistful farewells from her father, who had kept a noose in a closet for when he would find the nerve, though her mother had assured her he never would. She was fifteen when he hanged himself and sixteen when she suffered a breakdown, from which she emerged like an actress seeking a role.

  Soldier was on his knees and leaning forward from the hips. “What’s the matter?”

  “I fear loss,” she said evenly. “Loss is emptiness.”

  “What kind of talk is that?”

  Under the careful probing of his eyes, she lay like someone slain until he lifted her legs and drove them back to the exclamation mark of parted cleft and anal bud. “What are you doing?

  “I’m interested,” he said.

  Then he was on her, kissing her with an open mouth, which she endured with the knowledge that he was not integral to her life but merely a collage on the surface of it. Her thoughts were clear, bright, loud inside her skull. Soldier was chosen but unwanted. Without someone, anyone, she was a stranger to herself.

  When she felt him dissolve inside her, she waited for him to hop away like a soldier on the run. Instead, overstaying his welcome, he shrank out of her and then propped himself up to look into her face. His eyes were bloodshot, with the same thready redness clinging to the stone of a peach.

  “You didn’t come,” he said.

  • • •

  Chief Morgan keyed open the padlock, loosened the chain, and opened the cell door. Dudley was napping again. Morgan gently shook him awake and said, “Someone to see you.”

  Hi
s color was pale, disinfectant, with sleep marks withering a cheek. “Has my time come? That’s not an undertaker, is it?” Then his eyes went small in a yawn big enough to threaten his jaw. “I wish he wouldn’t.”

  Smoke twirled from a cigarette.

  “I had asthma as a child.”

  Harley Bodine, spooled silent and tight in pinstripes, viewed him with ferreting eyes, as if reading the fine print of a contract.

  “My mother almost lost me.” The cot creaked. Sitting up, Dudley scratched an underarm and smiled at Morgan. “I was dreaming. Little animals were everywhere, and I knew their names.”

  “What’s mine?” Bodine said and received a look empty of substance. “He’s not connecting.”

  Morgan stepped in. “Answer the question, Dudley.”

  The cot creaked again. “I know it’s not Sweeney.”

  Bodine’s gaze went to a book that lay open on its pages. “Is that what he reads?”

  “This is Mr. Bodine, Dudley. It was his boy who was killed by a subway train. Did you know him?”

  “His name was Glen,” Bodine said in a voice that sounded ripped from a bone, menace in his unblinking eyes, and for a bare second something in Dudley’s face altered, as though heat and cold had collided. Dudley was slow to gather words.

  “It doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “But you knew he wore braces,” Bodine said with dry intensity.

  Moments of confusion passed, and Dudley’s voice came out small, with a spin. “Was it in the paper?”

  “You tell me.”

  Morgan’s attention wavered from one to the other, from Bodine’s chalk part and silky tie to Dudley’s restless forelock. Dudley was concentrating on his thumb, and Morgan hoped he wouldn’t suck it. He did.

  Bodine’s shoe scraped, as if a nerve had leaped. “I’ve had enough.”

  Morgan, disappointed, held the door as Bodine stepped from the cell. The chain was left to dangle, the padlock to fend for itself. Meg O’Brien looked up when Morgan passed by her desk without a word, Bodine in the lead. Outside, in the gloom of the heat, they stared at each other as if for an instant their feelings matched.