And Five had, of course, also been establishing an alibi by spending those hours—the Truongs, the drink, and if I’d been willing, something extra after the drink—with us while his boys did his dirty work.
“The boy was exceptionally promising.” Five took long strides to the front window, then with another few steps returned to the divider. He punctuated his words by punching the palm of his right hand as he spoke. The cat watched him swivel and pace, back and forth, as if he were a one-man match at Wimbledon.
“He had a great future, a role in the big picture.” Two punches by the left hand into the right. “He could have made a real difference.” Five rigid paces to the window. Military about-face. “He loved me—I was his true father. I met him months ago, when I subbed at his school. He needed me. I guided him, explained the world to him. His friends loved him—they saved his life by eliminating Vo Van. He had it all—but she corrupted him, made him quit his family, made him betray his friends by leaving. I couldn’t let that happen.”
I felt as ill as if the venom in him were killing me. He looked at me with something like pity. I tried to readjust my vision of him. So handsome, clean-cut, charming, glib, and educated. So unlike my vision of foaming-at-the-mouth, tattooed skinhead fanatics—and therefore much more terrifying and dangerous.
Lowell had been right. The face of evil didn’t have to be grotesque. I had some prejudices of my own to get past. If I lived long enough to do so. About categorizing chinless whiners like Lowell and handsome charmers like Five.
“I wish you hadn’t gotten yourself involved with what need not have concerned you,” he said. “I know that nothing in that message was news to you. It’s been obvious for a long time that you’ve been prying and assuming and meddling. Baiting me with suspicions about something going on in school. Asking if you could sit in on the noon group.”
“But that was about drugs. Aldis thought the boys were using you—dealing drugs while you read or whatever.”
“Drugs? My boys? I would never tolerate such a thing. My boys have to stay clean!”
“Crucifying somebody isn’t clean.”
He brushed my words away. ‘The point is, you’ve been playing games with me all along. Quizzing Woody, conspiring with the black woman.”
“I wasn’t—not any of those—Flora? Why did you do those things to her?”
“She brought it on herself. Who does she think she is? Wrote a letter to the paper and couldn’t shut up in class about what she thought was going on. She was polluting them, lying to them.”
“She was upset about the vandalism at the Jewish cemetery—then that was you, too, wasn’t it?”
“Why do you care, Miss Pepper? Any ancestors buried there?”
“And my note. How did you get those copies of the school paper?”
“Come now. They aren’t exactly kept in a vault.”
“The church—the eighty-eight—that was you, too, wasn’t it? Or not you, but your long arms, your disciples, doing your dirty work. And my car—the spray paint.”
He smiled and stopped pacing.
“What sense does any of it make?”
He took on the demeanor of an earnest teacher, sharing a necessary lesson. “We are in terrible need of a cleansing. But change will only be the result of accumulated passion,” he explained in a patient voice. “Placidity, contentment, leads nowhere, so it’s necessary to stir things up, alert the populace, galvanize and generate emotions, create chaos, a vacuum into which order can then be brought. Which is not to be taken as an admission of any felonious act.”
I could only shake my head with disgusted amazement. And then I looked at him with new fear. “You—the mugging tonight, the gorilla mask—did you…?”
“Could anyone rational assume I had anything to do with it?”
What did rationality have to do with any of this? Still, he’d rescued me. Taken me to the hospital, to the police. But I had also been kept from getting to Woody, who could have told me who had nailed him to the backboard and why. So yes, his hands were again clean—healer’s hands, in fact, but I was sure he’d had everything to do with it, through his boys. The octopus’s tentacles, working for him. Very slick indeed. Hurt me, saved me—and now?
“What—What are you going to do now?” I forced myself to ask. “To…me?”
“What I’ve intended to do all evening. Leave you. Is the phone call worrying you? Don’t. His delusions and even yours make no difference. Your bruises and wounds have been taken care of. We’ve reported the stolen car, so I’ll be going now.”
“You’re leaving? Like that?”
“Is this an invitation to stay? I hardly think you’re up to it tonight, and I was under the impression you aren’t overly fond of me. And don’t you already have one lover, Amanda?”
Why had he said that leaving was what he’d intended all evening? Why that peculiar phrasing?
“I have to go,” he said softly.
I knew too much—and he knew that I knew. And he didn’t seem to care a bit. I wasn’t to be disciplined, or to become a lesson in his warped curriculum.
Then I thought I understood. If the police were already investigating him, he wouldn’t want to hurt me—it’d be too obvious. I breathed a little more easily.
But not for long. It still didn’t make sense to let me go on working with him, let me try and stop him from further noon sessions with his boys, to have him really face the American way—in prison, behind bars.
Unless he was going to run again. Tonight.
In which case he might as well do away with me.
The teakettle shrieked. I reached over and turned off the flame. My muscles, sore or not, twitched. I was geared for a fight or flight response, but he prompted neither. I was in a new kind of response—the flail.
I knew I was trapped, but I couldn’t understand how, or which way was out.
“Goodbye,” he said. He went to the door, opened it, and was halfway out within a second. Not one for long leave-takings. Then he turned back, his hand still on the knob. “I want you to know I am truly sorry all of this had to happen, because I thought I was going to like you a great deal.”
“All of what? What had to happen?” By now even my eyebrows were tense, on hyperalert. He was faking it, he had to be—wasn’t leaving at all. He wanted me to drop my guard and then he’d lunge, do something hideous. I slid open the kitchen drawer as quietly as I could and pulled out my most serious knife, holding it low, so he couldn’t see it behind the divider, clutching its handle, hoping I could use it effectively on something besides chicken parts.
“It never needed to happen,” he said, almost wearily. “If only you’d have…” He stood in the half-open door, the rain hissing and pounding behind him, his big frame and handsome face romantically wistful, a film noir picture of a reluctant leave-taker.
Behind him lightning cracked and thunder boomed with deafening proximity. The doorway turned white with electrical light—and in that instant I saw not only the dark outline of Bartholomew Dennison taking his leave, but of my cat—leaping in fright at the blast of noise and light, and in a directionless frenzy of feline fear, or simple lack of smarts, bolting out the door.
“No!” I shouted. “Macavity!” Still brandishing the knife, I ran after the cat—but Five stepped forward to stop me.
“You can’t!” He reached for me. I swung the knife and felt it make contact. He grunted and swerved sideways, jumped out of the knife’s arc, hitting one of the crutches. It thudded and clattered against the wall, knocking the other one loose, which flipped onto Five, who pitched forward headfirst onto and through the coffee table. The no-longer glass-topped coffee table, which shattered with amazing loudness as I raced out to my front steps.
“Macavity!” I shouted into the dark rain. Where was a bolt of lightning when I needed it? “Macavity!” I stood on the top step for a second, looking in both directions, and was granted my wish. The sky turned phosphorescent and I thought I saw a skinny, drowned thi
ng across the street, running toward the far corner.
“Macavity!” I screamed, taking off in his direction.
And then into a blur of light and noise—from above and in front. I saw the headlights and heard the honk, but too late. Something gargantuan bumped my hip and I went down—again—onto the cobblestones. Cobblestones are even less welcoming than a grassy patch.
This was definitely not my night for cars. Or much else. The painkillers kept their troops where they were, so that I had a moment to fully experience this new insult to my body. And then—what was this? Somebody again calling to me? Five? How had he extricated himself from the broken glass and wrought iron and crutches and his own blood? What did he want with me? I raised my arm—it was one of my few still-functioning parts—and waved it, punched, did whatever one exhausted, abused arm could do.
“Manda f’Go’sake—Manda!”
I let my arm flop down. Five’s voice box did not produce that musical mush.
He was hyperventilating. “Than’ God goin’ slow—saw this thing bolt from your—with a knife—whatsa knife—” The carving knife had landed on the opposite sidewalk. All I could think of for a moment was my mother’s strict advice to never leave it wet because it would rust. And there it was on the street in the rain.
“Macavity!” I said. “He ran out! The door was open—Five—your message, C.K.—he heard it, and—but I have to—”
“Whoa! First of all, can you stand up?”
Ah, yes, there was that. Again. I could. I creaked, I inhaled sharply, I leaned on him a lot—the lame leading the dinged—but I could stand. This time it truly amazed me. I was going to have one sore rear end, I already knew, but maybe once again nothing had been broken. I could make money on the side doing testimonials for calcium pills.
“Your face!” he said, finally, through his anxiety and concern and the pouring dark rain, noticing the gauze square, the strips of tape. “M’God, what—” And he trailed off into complete incomprehensibility.
“Later,” I said. “Macavity is—” And yet another helpfully timed bolt of lightning scared me to death, but illuminated my entire street, quaint cobblestones, hitching posts, neatly pointed bricks—and a wet slip of a cat cowering in the wrong doorway down the block. I hobbled in his direction and Mackenzie followed, caneless and limping seriously. “Please, puss,” I said when we neared. I put my arms out. “Come on home, you silly creature.” He mewled and looked at me—I thought with gratitude—but then he opted to be saved by the cop. Mackenzie shrugged and picked him up.
Then all of us—Mackenzie, the cat, and I—jumped at yet another deafening boom—but of a distinctive timbre, a different feel this time. Nothing celestial about it.
I could not bring myself to turn around and face its source. I heard Mackenzie’s sharp intake of air. I saw him grapple with the cat, who once again wanted to bolt—and I couldn’t blame him. The world was going mad. The only wrong thinking on the cat’s part was that it was possible to escape.
“Mandy,” Mackenzie said softly. “Your—my God, if you hadn’t—Jesus, exploded—it’s—”
Now, I didn’t need to turn around, but I finally did.
My house was in flames. When a bolt of lightning lit the street, I could see glass on the sidewalk, what looked like window framing, remnants of a planter box full of petunias.
“Five,” I said, too softly, perhaps, for Mackenzie to hear. In any case, he didn’t react to the name, but instead nearly tossed the cat at me and pounded on the doorway near us, ringing the bell. “Call nine-one-one!” he shouted. “Fire!” He rang the bell next door as well, and then ran, limping, favoring his good leg, but quickly enough, to ring a third bell. Somebody was going to call in my fire.
Meantime, C.K. had lurched across the street and was alerting my two neighbors to their personal danger.
I clutched Macavity and gaped. My little house. My all that I had ever accumulated. My all that was left. For a moment I felt I could not go on, and would not.
Five! I realized, envisioning his hitting the coffee table, lying there stunned while the house blew up around him. I’d killed him.
And then, with a great wave of nausea, I belatedly understood what had had to happen to me, why he’d needed so urgently to get out of my house—why he’d checked his watch so many times—and why he’d wanted me to stay there.
It would have worked so tidily, too, and again he’d be away from the scene and his hands clean. Except that he hadn’t listened to me about keeping the door shut, and then he’d tried to stop me from going after my cat.
“You saved me,” I whispered to Macavity, who was now under my wet shirt, sopping wet himself, but at least with the illusion of protection. That’s all any of us needs, or gets.
But how—when?—had Five had the time or opportunity to plant a bomb or whatever it had been? He’d been in my sight, in my living room, the whole time.
Of course. He’d told me how and when. He’d been playing a game when he asked me if I could go home again. Car thieves hadn’t stolen my car. His boys had. They’d killed for him, crucified for him, so what was the big deal about roughing me up and taking the car? And my keys—all my keys. And while my Good Samaritan showered attention on me, giving him the perfect alibi, his remote control arms and legs could unlock my front door and plant whatever they liked, and set a timer.
The fire company arrived with amazing alacrity. I heard the comforting whine of the siren and watched while Mackenzie limped double time to move his car and clear room.
It was too late to save anything. My house was gone. It was so small to start with, and now it was nothing. In one night I’d become homeless, carless, and hurt.
I wanted to weep for all the losses, but even more, for the ugliness and the ruination and the pure destructive stupidity of it. And for the knowledge that the end of Bartholomew Dennison the Fifth did not in any way mean the end of the epidemic of hate.
Then, amazingly, from beneath my blouse I heard, above and through the siren and the storm, a low, happy motor sound. The cat was contented. The cat was home.
And I realized that I was, too. Anything I had of true value was out here on the street with me and had been saved—life and love of the human and animal variety.
The rest was stuff. Stuff was replaceable.
*
For a thousand years before I personally learned it—compliments of maniacs blowing up my house—people have commented on the peculiar ways fate works. After fourteen months of thoroughly modem impasses—of dithering, of inventing reasons for and against, of weighing past experience against future probabilities, of resenting the realities of work schedules and even of the housing market, of thinking I’d think about it when I had the time—the issue of whether my relationship with Mackenzie would move on or die was resolved by a suave but insane racist.
“Don’ want you livin’ out of a shopping cart with newspapers over your head,” Mackenzie said as we stood in the rain watching firemen toss a ruined, smoldering sofa and my best beloved suede chair out onto the street. “Let alone draggin’ Macavity down with you.”
Call it charity on his part, call it pragmatism on mine, call it whatever you like—we call it living together. And so far, I call it fine. Mackenzie—he calls it “fahn.” And the groupie ingrate cat thinks the sunny loft is heaven.
We’re testing the cop’s theory of balancing the scale, adding a little bit of love as a counterweight to the hating all around us. It’s not a bad way of making a difference.
My Mustang was found. After all, the thieves weren’t pros at car disposal. They were too busy studying hate and bombs and tooling around on a joy ride. The insurance company felt sorry for me and assumed all of the pocks and scrapes were caused by the thieves. Car had a new paint job and has never looked better.
As for those thieves, Five’s boys—they are on probation, being counseled, and doing long stretches of community service, and I have hope for them. Tony, who admitted to shooting Vo Van, i
s awaiting trial along with his accomplice, Guy. April is still in New Jersey, and Woody in physical therapy. I try to stay in touch with both and not to think how uncomplicated and ordinary their story could have been. It was nothing more than an adolescent lover’s triangle that would have been resolved by time, had not hatred and prejudice and wrongheaded theories been added to the equation.
On the home front, my accumulated bumps and cuts and bruises warranted the much-coveted sick leave. Do be careful what you ask for.
My little house didn’t require much of a bomb to be totaled, but some of the third floor’s contents were saved—my roll book, for example. And Miles’s poem.
As for the loft, we’re fixing the plumbing and electrical system. The For Sale sign is down, and the rent-a-room folk have retrieved C.K.’s cloying faux-Southwestern furniture. I have insurance money to buy replacements. Or my half of them. We’re doing it slowly, picking items together, assigning each piece to one of us, against such a time as we no longer cohabit. But meantime, the purchase of each new pillow feels amazingly like an upholstered form of commitment. So far, neither of us has gagged on the concept.
We still have our own credit cards, our own checking accounts, and our basic conflicts.
We still have our unmatched suitcases at the ready—but on high shelves, difficult to reach.
*
Last week Condé Nast Traveler did a survey of friendly cities. They set up all sorts of tests for the citizenry, and once again the City of Brotherly Love scored highest. Beat out all the sweetness and light sites in the U.S.
So the most hostile city is simultaneously the most friendly.
Fate and surveys work in mysterious ways.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Copyright
In the Dead of Summer
For Jane Walsh and Howard Pearlstein,
Special thanks and gratitude to Susan Dunlap and Marilyn Wallace for sharing their considerable talents with me, and to the Emergency Muse Cooperative—Freddie Greene, Maggie Mascow, and Helen Preston—for riding to the rescue when needed.
In the Dead of Summer Page 24
