“Whatever makes you happy.”
Goodman walked into the room and stood with his hands in his pockets, surveying the damaged premises. Several swatches had been cut from the carpet. The walls were still streaked with splattered blood, which had turned an ugly shade of brown. Goodman took out his notebook, make a quick sketch of the room, walked past the bed and stared down at the outline chalked into the enormous, hardened blot where blood had soaked into the carpet. The table and lamp still lay where they had fallen in the comer. A sudden chill passed through Goodman and he shook it off. This was a room still oppressed by pain and fear, by hate, anger and retribution.
To Goodman, there was always something incomplete, yet eerily personal, about the scene of a homicide, a sense that somehow the victim would not really be dead until the the place was cleaned and painted and restored to its old order and until all evidence of violence had been eradicated. The chalk figure on the floor seemed to be a part of the victim’s persona. Such a radical termination was like a pause in a conversation, with the rest of the sentence still trapped somewhere in the room, waiting to be said.
Subconsciously, his imagination played out the bishop’s final brutal moments, terror ashlike in his mouth as life was carved from his body. And while Goodman now held the victim in utter disdain, he wondered whether Archbishop Rushman realized, in those last fleeting moments of life, that his life had been a lie and that he was stepping across the threshold of hell.
Goodman shook off his thoughts and turned to the closet. He entered it, saw the tape machine and recorder in the comer. He fingered through robes hanging neatly from padded hangers, looked behind them, checked the stainless steel shoe rack, the drawers of shirts and sweaters. In the rear of the closet, he found the tapes, two stacks piled neatly on a shelf near the recorder. There were maybe thirty of them. His eyes raced down the labels, checking the handwritten titles, most of them labeled “Sermon” and the date. Then near the bottom of the stack, his eyes froze on one label.
“Altar Boys. 2/9/83.”
There it was! He stared at it for several seconds, moved back along the rows of clothes and looked out the door. The cop was still reading. He slipped on a pair of nylon gloves, returned to the stack of tapes, knelt down and carefully peeled the label off the altar boy tape and placed it on the new tape, smoothing it out with his thumb. Then he edged the altar boy tape out a few inches and pulled it sharply free of the stack. The stack dropped down with a thunk. He heard the guard’s chair creak and, reaching up, flipped a couple of tapes off the top of the stack onto the floor, and dropped the new tape among them.
He slipped the altar boys tape under his belt and pulled the sweater down over it as he knelt down to pick up the fallen tapes. The guard appeared in the doorway to the closet.
“What the fuck?” he said with irritation.
“It’s okay,” Goodman said, replacing the tapes back on top of the stack. “Just a little clumsy.”
“Yeah, well watch it, huh? Break sumpin’, I gotta take the heat.”
“I’ll be more careful,” Goodman said.
Goodman returned to the bedroom with the guard, who went back to his chair and resumed his reading. Goodman went into the bathroom, opened cabinets and slammed them, rattled around, making noise and whistling. He quietly unlocked the bathroom window and swung it out, leaned over and looked down. A garbage can was directly under him. He quickly pulled out the tape, aimed it and let it go. He pulled the window shut before it hit and went back into the hall, notebook in hand, jotting down aimless notes.
“Get everything you need?” the cop asked.
“I think so. This the kitchen down here?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll just check it out,” Goodman said. “Maybe go down and look over the grounds. Want to let me out?”
“Okay. Need a flashlight? It’s black as a nightmare down there.”
“Got one,” he said, taking it out of his pocket.
He did a cursory check of the kitchen, then went out the back door and stared down the stairs.
“Wonder why he ran back inside the church?” Goodman said, half to himself.
“The way I heard it, the beat cop happened to be walkin’ past in the alley back there. Stroke a luck, otherwise the little shit woulda been on the street and gone.”
“I’ll just go down and look around. You can lock up behind me. Thanks.”
“Yeah. Colder’n a witch’s tit out there.”
“You can say that again.”
He went down the wooden stairs to ground level, strolled aimlessly a while, then walked around the comer to the can and reached in, rustling around the loose papers. He felt the tape, quickly removed it from the can and slipped it back under his belt.
Ten minutes later he was on his way to Vail’s house.
NINETEEN
Molly’s bedroom door was open and she was sitting at the small desk in her room, writing notes and leafing through a half dozen thick, official-looking books, when she heard the tapping and the indistinct sound of singing. She stuck a pencil between the pages to mark her place and went cautiously down the hall. The sound was coming from the second-floor den. A door led to a large closet adjacent to it. It had been converted into a mini greenhouse with a six-foot-long zinc-lined table with a small sink at one end. A row of grow lights plugged into an automatic timer created the illusion of daylight twelve hours a day. Beneath the lights was a row of small, delicate blue flowers surrounded by fernlike leaves. On the other side of the narrow room was a plastic-covered cubicle, its sides misty with man-made dew. Four puny orchids were suspended from the ceiling inside the tiny hothouse. Vail was pruning the flowers and doing a subdued tap dance and singing along. “Me and my shadow, strolling down the avenue …” He looked up, embarrassed to see Molly standing in the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come up.”
“You had your nose in the books.”
“Just trying to make some sense out of all this. Is this your hobby?”
He seemed embarrassed and even a bit annoyed, as if she had invaded his private space, but he recovered quickly and nodded.
“I started out growing orchids,” he said. “Not too successfully so far. They’re pretty skimpy.”
“What are these?” she asked, nodding toward the blue flowers.
“My mother called them blue belles,” he said. “Not the kind of bells that ring, belles like beautiful young ladies. They’re winter flowers, grow wild. This is my fourth shot trying to cultivate them. I may just have beat the odds this time.”
“Odds?”
“They don’t like a false habitat,” he said. “Probably yearn for real sunshine.”
She looked around the small alcove. “So you’re a closet horticulturist,” she said with a chuckle.
“Don’t tell anybody.” He smiled and winked at her. “My mother loved blue belles. They grew along the bank of the river. I used to pick them and take them home to her and she’d put them on the piano and sometimes I’d hear her talking to them. ‘This is Mozart,’ she’d say, and tell them a little bit about him while she played.”
“Is that why you grow this particular variety?”
“I suppose.”
“What was she like?”
“Actually she gave up a spot in the city symphony to marry my dad. Moved to a little town and taught piano. Every day she taught piano. I don’t think she liked teaching as much as she just loved the piano. Kids came with the territory.”
“What did your dad do?”
“Schoolteacher. He was also the bandmaster in the high school. They both were musicians but my mother was the one with the talent. My dad, he was kind of a Henry Hill. He liked the flash more than the music.”
“Sounds like a happy family.”
He looked at her for a long time before he answered. “Not particularly. She was an alcoholic. Died when I was in the eighth grade.”
“I’m sorry.”
&nb
sp; “Why? It wasn’t your fault.”
“That’s a funny answer,” she said.
“Impertinent, probably. It’s just that… it’s always struck me as strange. I say my mother’s dead and somebody says ‘I’m sorry,’ yet they didn’t know her.”
“I was sorry for you,” she said. “She was obviously important to you. I’m sorry for your pain.”
The answer seemed to surprise him and it was a moment or two before he answered, “That’s a lovely thought. Thank you.” He wafted his hand gently across the tops of the blue flowers and watched the tiny petals fidget, his mind drifting with the tiny blossoms.
* * *
The past fall, Vail had returned to his hometown for the first time in ten years, a trip he had avoided since he had started his legal practice in the city. He chose to make the three-hour drive at night, and he set off on the journey with enormous apprehension. The first two and a half hours were pleasant enough, it was the last thirty minutes, after he entered what was ironically known as Rainbow Flats, that the bad memories began, rushing at him from the dark. Old names and faces he thought he had purged forever nibbled at his brain. Worst of all was Rainbow Flats itself.
A century and a half before, some half-lost exploring party had stumbled onto the vast ridge that sprawled for almost fifty miles, defining the banks of a white-water river. Elm, oak and pine trees abounded. Wildflowers etched the shores of the river. Deer and bear scurried from their watering places as the party invaded their land. What was truly ironic was that it would take so little time for the name to be defiled.
He was forewarned, his headlights leading him on the grim and baleful drive over a weary, pitted two-laner. Then he saw the glow on the horizon. The stench came next, before he burst from the state park into the open place. Forms began to materialize through smoke and steam. Then the sounds began. He seemed to grow a little smaller, to shrink into himself as he wound past great chemical plants, paper mills, steel furnaces and oil refineries. Nothing had changed, the place had simply spread like a scourge on the land. The vast and violent landscape was a shadowy, disfigured inferno beyond Dante’s wildest imagination. It assaulted and numbed all his senses.
Tall stacks spewed clouds of acid smoke into the vulnerable sky. Steel mills belched up blinding balls of flame that seemed to feed on the chemicals swirling through the air. Gases bubbled up through murky rivers and streams. Hissing sounds and clanging sounds and roaring sounds and whistles screaming and horns howling and heavy iron wheels screeching on steel rails all created man-made thunderclaps. And from it all, from this holocaust of America at work, foul odors burned his nose and eyes. The earth around him seemed to have been reduced to a great, rotting cadaver.
It went on mile after mile: the blazing lights, the belching furnaces, the cacophony of progress, the disgusting stink of success. Mile after mile without a tree or blade of grass to hide the copper-stained earth. Mile after mile without seeing a soul. It was as if he had stumbled on some burned-out, robot-driven planet frantically manufacturing its own destruction.
The industrial park, as it was called by the Chamber of Commerce, ended when the river curved under the highway bridge, forming a natural barrier between the Flats and Oakdale, the town of his birth. On impulse he suddenly pulled off the road and stopped in a turnaround just before the bridge. He got out of the car, leaned on a fender and lit a cigarette, as he stared across the river.
From this vantage point, nothing seemed to have changed. The tannery, a long, low warehouse of a building, still dominated the riverfront on the south side of Bridge Road, and the drab brick building housing the shoe mill commanded the norm side.
This was the place that had spawned Martin Vail and nurtured him to manhood—and which he had finally fled, abandoning family and friends and disdaining its tarnished heritage. The past was a kaleidoscope, its fragments tumbling through his mind: the jaunty brass of the high school band practicing on the afternoon of a football game; appraising the cheerleaders and particularly Elaine Golanka’s long, lovely legs from the sanctity of a football huddle; the smell of boiled coffee in his grandmother’s kitchen; the fearful anticipation of his first kiss in the back seat of Paul Swain’s Chevy; the excitement of testing the ice on the river after the first freeze of the year, and the muffled hiss of the first snowfall; the stark finality of his mother’s funeral; the joyful cheers as Dr. Nolan handed out the last diploma on commencement day; the wondrous gaze of Pal, his first puppy, and the dreadful hurt in his chest when he realized it was Pal who lay crushed under the wheels of a semi up on River Street; the smell of sour milk at the end of the night when he worked in Jesse Kraft’s ice cream shop; the smell of Emily Grantham’s hair and how hard her nipples were and how warm her thigh was up under her skirt; that awful heart-stabbing moment when she told him she thought she was pregnant, and the rush of relief when her period finally started.
Now he had been drawn back here to say good-bye to the woman who had put him through college and urged, almost demanded, that he leave Oakdale and never come back. Catlain Vail. Ma Cat, his grandmother.
A police car pulled up beside him and he shielded his eyes against the harsh beam of a flashlight.
“Need some help?” a youthful voice asked pleasantly.
“No thanks, just taking in the view,” he answered.
“Better put your flasher on,” the cop suggested. “Those big trucks really come barreling through here.”
“Thanks, I’ll do that,” Vail answered.
The cop car pulled away and went on across the bridge. But when Vail got back in the car to switch on his warning lights, he realized the spell was broken. He cranked up and followed the blue police car across the narrow span.
The main street had changed very little in ten years. The stores all looked the same, except several had been bought out by the big chains, and the Ritz, the movie theater which had shown old classics on Sunday night and introduced him to Cagney, O’Brien, Robinson, Bogart, Tracy and Busby Berkeley, had been converted into a flea market. He passed Shick Madson’s barbershop and a tinge of hurt stung his chest. He stopped for a minute and stared at the sidewalk in front of the shop.
He had been in the dairy foods with the gang that day when Dick Hurst had rushed in. “Hey Marty, you better come quick. Somethin’ happened to your dad.”
He was lying on his back, his one leg bent under the other, his hands at his sides, staring through half-open eyes at the sky.
“What happened?” somebody said, and somebody else answered, “It’s Larry Vail, the bandmaster from the school. Must have had a heart attack. Just got a haircut, walked out the door and fell over dead. Just like that.”
Staring at the spot, what he remembered most was sitting in the funeral home later thinking, Why does death always come at me so suddenly, without any warning at all. His mother, his first puppy, his best friend, now his father.
The old hospital, once a rambling collection of wooden buildings, was gone. In its place was a five-story glass-and-brick medical center. He drove past, not quite ready yet to face Ma Cat, and went up Pine Road to his grandmother’s house, a stately old anachronism sheltered by trees that protected it from the low, rambling ranch houses that encroached on it. All the other old houses were gone except that one proud two-story Victorian, still clinging tenaciously to the past. He pulled up the curved driveway. It was obvious Ma Cat was no longer there. The lawn was overgrown, the bushes needed pruning, and the night light was either burned out or someone had turned it off. There was about the place a vestige of capitulation. At least grammar school scoundrels had not started breaking the windows yet. To Martin, broken windows tolled the death knell for any structure.
Memories flooded over him and choked his throat. It was on that front porch that he had learned his mother was dead and it had been Catlain Vail, not his father, who had passed on the dreadful news. He had dropped the clutch of blue belles he was bringing to her and run off, seeking the solace of the elm grove to deal wi
th his sudden grief and with his sense of betrayal, for they had not prepared him, not warned him that his mother was dying. He had stayed there until old man Watkins had come with the hearse and then had run back, first fighting and kicking them, then pleading with them to leave her there a little longer, as if there was still some small breath of life left in her and taking her away to the funeral home would snuff that out. The others had treated his grief as an annoyance, an interference with the commerce of death, but Ma Cat understood his agony and his instant sense of loneliness and had consoled him and had nursed and healed his broken heart.
Ma Cat and this house were Martin Vail’s last ties to family and past. He was about to shut the door on over half his life. He shook off his melancholy as he drove back down to the hospital.
He thought he was prepared to deal with it but he was not. Cancer had whittled Ma Cat down to a mere twig of a woman, her hands so bony it shocked him when he squeezed one of them, her arms mere bone and skin, all muscle and fat having been long since devoured by the scavengers that raided her body. Gray skin, like wax paper, stretched tightly around her skull. And her eyes, those once glittering mirrors of a wise and mischievous soul, were lifeless marbles, staring dolefully from pits deep within her ravaged face. Plundered, what remained of her hardly caused a ripple in the covers. There was about her, too, the musty smell of death and the same heartless and inhuman sounds of progress that characterized Rainbow Flats: the heart machine beeping her life away, an oxygen feeder ca-chunking in the comer, a monitor somewhere in the darkness of the room humming ominously. She stared up at him from the brink of eternity through half-open eyes, each breath a desperate, rattling plea to turn off the machines and let her go.
Could she see him? Could she hear him? Was she even aware that he was there beside her?
“Ma, it’s Marty,” he said, leaning close to her ear. “Can you hear me, Ma?”
There was no sign of recognition but he kept whispering in her ear, telling her that he was there and how much he had missed her. The nurse came in and did all the things nurses do. He could see her peripherally, puttering around, adjusting the cocks on tubes, checking EEG readouts, looking at the chart before she drifted out of sight.
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