Voices in the Dark

by Andrew Coburn

  “Somebody better come over here and explain.”

  The line went dead, and, still holding the receiver, wondering how she had gotten into this, she looked at Myles, who had heard everything. Myles said, “You go.”

  • • •

  Sergeant Avery, told to be discreet, searched for Dudley behind the stores on the far side of the green. Hank Brody, who owned the hardware store, poked his head out the back door and asked whether he was scavenging. The droll and stylish white-haired woman at Roberta’s Ladies Shoppe asked whether he’d like to step in and try on an ensemble. She thought he might look chic in a short-sleeve patterned jacket with black shorts, which she had been saving for a customer from the Heights.

  Officer Floyd Wetherfield reconnoitered book aisles at the library, pausing to examine an art folio someone had left on a reading table. He slapped the cover shut when the librarian, Holly Pride, came upon him and asked whether she could help him.

  Later he parked his cruiser near Pearl’s Pharmacy, slouched behind the wheel, and kept his eye on the green until the approach of darkness when Fred Fossey, commander of the local Legion post, stood in respectful attention among Boy Scouts for the lowering of the flag. A bugle sounded. The flag cascaded down the pole like paint.

  Chief Morgan drove to Pearson Grammar School, behind which men, young and not so young, were acting out fantasies in a slow-pitch game of softball, each assuming the mannerisms of Crack Alexander in his prime. Another time Morgan might have joined them.

  On Summer Street he slowed at Dorothea Farnham’s house, viewed the porch Dudley had desecrated, and spotted Dorothea chinning with a neighbor over a dividing hedge recently barbered. At the end of the street, vaulted by maples, he made a U-turn and found his pulse beating abnormally from an anxiety he hoped was unwarranted. On his shoulders was a burden he felt he had put there himself.

  It was dark when he finally quit looking and returned to the station. The nighttime dispatcher, Bertha Skagg, a large woman whose floral dress shouted attention to her unfortunate size and shape, was ensconced behind Meg O’Brien’s daytime desk with her usual air of being put upon or of being left out of things, grievances that had put a permanent twist to her mouth.

  She said, “You let the tramp go?”

  Fiddling with papers on Sergeant Avery’s desk, he sort of said yes.

  “Good, it was creepy having him here,” she said. “Eugene called in. He said to tell you, ‘No luck,’ whatever that means. I guess you know, ’cause I don’t.”

  “How about Floyd?”

  “Floyd doesn’t tell me anything. You got a call from a Mrs. Bodine. The number’s on your desk.”

  He entered his office, shut the door behind him, and looked at the number. Brookline. The first Mrs. Bodine. She answered immediately, and when he identified himself she said, “What kind of man are you?”

  The agonized voice was raw enough to freeze his ear and arrest his other senses. He ripped a page from his calendar block, on which he seldom wrote anything, a dental appointment perhaps, a reminder to pick up dry cleaning.

  “You had no right,” she said. “It was cruel what you did.”

  What had he done other than his job, or what seemed his job? One did not do what was necessarily right but what seemed poignant. A rule, he supposed, every policeman followed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’re having an affair with Har-ley’s wife? Is that supposed to be your secret?” Her voice was a needle with no thread, simply an instrument of puncture, nothing worth stitching. “You tried to use me, Chief.”

  It seemed pointless to defend himself. Expostulation seldom, if ever, worked. Besides, she was no longer on the line.

  A while later, with a rumbling effort, her heaviness a burden on her legs, Bertha Skagg heaved herself up, poked open his door, and looked in. “I thought you were sleeping,” she said. “Don’t you have a home?”

  This was more of one, his choice since his wife’s death. At times he could not remember his wife’s face, as if time had burned the memory to ash. Other times it was more vivid than when she had been alive. “Where do we go from here, Bertha? Where do we go when it’s all over?”

  “You asking me?”

  “It’s a reasonable question.”

  “I have no lofty thoughts,” she said, resuming a frown. “My mind is like my legs. It can’t climb stairs.”

  He looked at her in a warmer light, remembering when she had lost her cat and for a solid year sought its return through a boxed ad in The Crier, Offered a reward. Signed herself Heartbroken. Meg O’Brien offered one of hers, but it wasn’t the same. He said, “Close the door after you.”

  He picked up the phone and called the second Mrs. Bodine. He heard someone lift the receiver and immediately replace it. He repunched the number, and his eyes fainted shut when she answered.

  “This is James.”

  “Yes, I know your voice.”

  “Anything the matter?”

  “I was undecided,” she said vaguely.

  “Can we talk?”

  “All night if you wish.”

  • • •

  An hour back from the beach, a plate of cold chicken and tomato wedges consumed, Anthony Smith was flopped in one of his bedroom chairs and reading Chaucer when Patricia, her un-scraped face moistened with a lotion, stepped in uninvited. “Prithee, get the fuck out of here,” he said.

  “Don’t talk to me that way, you prick.” Her cheeks glistened, her nose was a dab of light, her eyes flashed. “My chemistry teacher would murder for what you get.”

  “Your chemistry teacher, huh? Man or woman?”

  “A man, you asshole.” She plunked herself into the other chair, her legs thrown out, and stared at him with undeflectable eyes. “What are you reading that shit for? It’s archaic.”

  “It’s on my list.”

  “Anais Nin’s on mine. What do you think of that?”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Figures. Do you love me, Tony?”

  He flipped a page. “Why do you want to mess it up?”

  “Because five years from now you’ll wish you’d said yes.”

  He lifted his eyes, but with his grip firmly on Chaucer. “You know I do,” he said, the wallop of truth in his face.

  “Then say it.”

  “No.”

  “What are you so afraid of? My mother?” Her eyes were trained on him, her smile tense, disruptive, truant. “You’re scared to death of her, aren’t you?”

  “With reason,” he said.

  • • •

  “This way,” Paul Gunner said, and with the pressure of a thumb on her arm he guided Phoebe Yarbrough deeper into the house, past a mirror that gave a good report. She was wearing black jeans; her legs were ink strokes. Her heels sank in the carpeting; a club chair reared up and possessed her, and in that instant she wished she hadn’t come. He gazed down at her from his bulk, and she guessed that he didn’t want to talk about his wife. “Let her stay the night if that’s what she wants,” he said. “Maybe she’s going through the change. What do I know?”

  “It may have been the punch I served,” Phoebe suggested.

  “Let’s talk about Myles,” he said, stepping back, sinking into a chair the twin of hers, which he overfilled. “How’s he doing?”

  “Since you ask, not well.” Her back was straight, her legs crossed. “But I’m sure you already know that.”

  “I could help him, I suppose. Low-interest loan to tide him over. After all, what are neighbors for?”

  “Nice of you to offer,” she said, “but Myles can stand on his own two feet.”

  His eyes narrowed to nothing, but his mouth was swollen big in a smile, as if his teeth were sunk into the rubber guard of a boxer. “You really think so?”

  Stretching her long neck, she glanced about the room, densely masculine with its dark wood, extra-plush drapes, heavy furniture, and brass lamps that produced more shadow than light, all of which made her suspect a trap, one w
ith steel jaws if she was reading him right.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said. “What did you do in New York? Career woman, weren’t you?”

  She had been through this before with him, but in a crowd, safety in faces, always others to interrupt. “I did publicity.”

  “Ah, yes, you did mention that once. What company?”

  “I was free-lance.”

  “When I owned my company, I was in New York a lot. Stayed at the Pierre. It suited me.” There was no movement in his face, but his smile was effusive. “Myles says your father was in government. Treasury.”

  Her father had stood in a New Jersey turnpike booth and handled money all day, hands beaten and bruised from it. “Low-level,” she said.

  “Is he still alive?”

  He had had high blood pressure and had been lax about his medication. The day he died his face looked like a flash burn. “No,” she said, aware how drastically the dead fade with the years and distance themselves to a degree she wouldn’t have thought possible. But then in a random dream or the triggering of a memory they return larger than life, more vital than ever.

  “My father,” Gunner said, “was a genius.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “And so am I.”

  “I’ve heard that too.” She disliked Gunner’s lips. Fatty morsels. That he was brilliant had impressed her but not intimidated her. She sensed something was coming and waited.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  What was he saying? Did she want to hear? Her own silence pressed upon her, along with a boding of danger.

  “I had a beard then, and I wasn’t as heavy.” Each shift in his smile was a tactical maneuver. “Funny, I never forgot you.”

  With nothing to say, she sat like a cup of tea gone cold, his lip print on the rim. She remembered some clients as series of eager thrusts alternating with pauses recommended by their doctors, some as vulgar voices lining the shell of her ear, others as eyes going awry, no longer true mates, lust putting them at odds. She remembered no faces.

  “You were the only woman I know could undress with an air of decorum.”

  His voice was intrusive, a key digging in, twisting loose secrets, though she felt nothing other than lightheadedness, somewhat like a forger relieved at being unmasked.

  “I remember,” he said, “we smoked marijuana of a particularly heady variety.”

  She had done that a few times with men she guessed would be a chore. Or when she felt she might be pitched into a situation she couldn’t handle. Cannabis could calm.

  “I reckon you married Myles for respectability. Too bad you picked a loser.”

  Respectability had been a major factor, but so had the tender way he had handled her breasts, treating her as a woman first, the other second. Unlocking her thighs, gripping the arms of the chair, she rose. Clumsily, Gunner rose too.

  “I’m not the type to spread tales.”

  “What do you want, Paul?”

  “For myself, nothing. But it’s time my oldest boy learned what it’s all about. He’s got a birthday coming up. I can’t think of a nicer present, can you?”

  She saw in his face the fat that runs through steak and the gristle that can’t be chewed but must be discreetly spat into a napkin or casually placed on the side of the plate. Her composure was amazing.

  “It’ll be worth your while,” he said. “And I can call it secretarial service and write you off.”

  “No, Paul, it wouldn’t be worth it.”

  “Think it over.”

  She took a step, but he presented too much weight and mass. He proliferated, listed. He was a solidity she could not get by. “Now I remember you,” she said, releasing a smile luminous and enchanting. “You disgusted me. Your brat would disgust me more.”

  She sidestepped him but did not make it past his chair. The first blow glanced off her face. The second cracked a bone.

  • • •

  Chief Morgan lived beyond Pearson Grammar School on Winter Street in a small gingerbread Victorian in need of painting, caulking, and reshingling, tasks he thought he might one day do himself, though he had no skills. The time spent in it was minimal, the food in the refrigerator was often spoiled, and the dog next door was a nuisance. Anything started it barking. In the kitchen was an old portable television, uncabled. He had seen at least three times every episode of Kojak and The Rockford Files. Telly Savalas and James Garner were like family.

  In the front room he hit a wall switch, and light bulged from a window lamp, a beacon for Kate Bodine, another one outside on the porch. The room, which he and his wife had inexpertly wallpapered, was one he seldom entered, for he learned only too well that the familiar turns sinister in the agony of loss. The summer after Elizabeth’s death, her garden had mocked him with its overlush bloom, sweet William flickering like fire, lupine blazing on the stalk, bleeding heart dripping its sorrow. The red maple sapling planted nearby had taunted him with a shadow longer than his until he tore it up by the roots.

  In the bathroom he splashed his face with cold water, smoothed his hair back with wet hands, and wondered whether Kate Bodine would show up. He did not like waiting around, which consumed too much energy, all of it nervous. Then he heard the slow slam of a car door and the bark of the neighbor’s dog and knew she was out there.

  Her snappy little car, a tongue of silver in the moonlight, was parked on the street. Stepping silently out the front door, he saw her pause on the sidewalk as if unsure she had the right house. Then in the small driveway she paused again and scrutinized his old Chevy, public property, eaten at the edges, its official function denoted by the town seal. Looking past him as he descended the porch step, she said, “It’s not what I pictured. Do you live in there alone?”

  “When I’m here.” The dog, a mongrel, was still yapping. Shrubbery separating the narrow properties stood jagged against the night air. “Would you like to come in?”

  His neighbor, an elderly widow with whom he did not get along, hollered from an unlit window. “That you out there?”

  “Yes,” he shouted back.

  “Who’s that with you?”

  “None of your business, Mrs. Winkler.”

  Kate said, “Why don’t we walk?” They moved to the sidewalk and strolled side by side in the direction of the school. The moon seemed bigger and nearer than normal, as if some force had driven it down. Kate dropped her head back. “I want to know who threw all those stars up there.”

  “I know I didn’t,” Morgan said. “At least not all of them.”

  “No mosquitoes,” she observed.

  “The town sprayed. You people from the Heights demanded it. Your taxes paid for it.”

  “I won’t mention it to my husband. He says the taxes here are exorbitant.”

  Thin clouds caroused the lit sky. A breeze walked the street. Morgan said, “How are you doing with your husband?”

  “He’s trying to get me pregnant, but it won’t work. I’m on the pill. I’m telling you too much, of course, most of it none of your business.”

  “Where is he tonight?”

  “Out. I don’t believe he mentioned where. What do you want to talk to me about?”

  “About him. I have certain suspicions.”

  “He has many about you.” Mosquitoes attacked her legs, and she slapped herself below the knees. “Damn it.”

  “We can’t get ’em all,” Morgan said fatalistically, his eye on the school. Darkness packaged the brick, and moonlight ribboned it. They gazed at it.

  “Did you go there?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m a real townie. Except for Vietnam, Bensington’s the only world I know.”

  “What suspicions?”

  Slowing his step, he related them in a quiet and reserved voice, no inflections. He mentioned her dead stepson by name and the drowned Gunner girl by age. To his missing prisoner he assigned a kind of perverse truth. At one point, even to his own ear, the drama verged on the preposterous, which temp
orarily dismayed him. When he finished, she moved away from him with her eyes lifted.

  “It’s the stars they say that keep the sky pinned in place. Thank God for the stars, James.”

  “What does the moon do?” he asked.

  “It moves oceans. For a dead thing I’d say that’s damn good.”

  He followed her into folds of darkness beneath a tree, where her scent became the heaviest ingredient in the air. He made out only a single line of her face, enough to draw him close. Her white hand came out of nowhere and manacled his bare wrist.

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “I didn’t think you would,” he said.

  She let go. “You said it yourself. You live in a vacuum.”

  • • •

  In May Hutchins’s backyard the shallow pool of the birdbath trapped the moon and toyed with its shape. May, refilling a bird feeder, listening to the soothing murmurs of the night, felt magical. Breezes lifted her colored hair, airing her scalp. Moonlight moved over grass, awakened phlox, gave life to a moribund shrub, gripped a croquet ball, and enameled the face of a man in the fretwork of the gazebo.

  “Who’s there?” she said, and her voice startled a young raccoon that with racketing claws scrabbled halfway up the pear tree. Through the ghostly dim she could see only the creature’s luminous eyes, like fired bullets frozen between two worlds.

  She returned to the house.

  Her husband spoke to her through the bathroom door. “Who were you talking to out there?”

  “Myself,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. Fluorescent lighting could be cruel.

  “You shouldn’t roam around in the dark.”

  “Lots of things I shouldn’t do,” she said, “and, damn it, I don’t.”

  She lingered in the bathroom, ruminating on the state of her hair and the state of herself. Living on memories, she felt undernourished. She thought back to her fortieth birthday, her realization that her youth had vanished, no way to reach it, address unknown. She had had herself a good cry, and later Roland with his flipper arms had tried to please her in bed. Fifty was when she began brooding over mistakes in her life. At sixty, she supposed, she would learn to live with them.