Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  “In that case, I’ll pray for death.”

  Brendan recoiled, tilting his head in incomprehension like a dog regarding TV. He’d never heard such a thing said before. He backed away from her, all desire and eagerness gone. Death was real to Brendan — not funny, not ever funny.

  During lunch period Araby wrote a get-me-out-of-here letter to her father. In Math she faked an upbeat note to her mother. Her mother wasn’t well. Percodan and the collapse of her marriage had landed her in a Park Avenue clinic for the wealthy incapable, necessitating Araby’s emergency sojourn with her mother’s aunt, Carolyn Winston, who’d pushed as hard for the visit as Araby had resisted, each wanting the company of young people. The visit would end this winter when Araby entered at midyear Miss Somebody’s School for Girls.

  Life with the Winstons — Aunt Carolyn and Uncle John to Araby — was no improvement over life with her broke-down mother. Take Araby’s arrival last week. Mr. Winston, sunning himself in the solarium, had arisen from his chaise in a spasm of ireful abstraction and hurled a porcelain vase through a skylight. Enter Araby, dressed punk-black and already apprised of life among doddering farts, for though someone had been supposed to meet her at the Penscot airfield, this had been botched. She’d got a taxi, paid the fare, then marched through the Winstons’ open front door intending to lay on some guilt. She paused in the breezeway. Sun poured down on the scene.

  A short doughy lady in an apron was sweeping broken glass into a dustpan manned by a bluejeaned younger woman (the cook and housekeeper, Araby would learn) while a black nurse massaged Mr. Winston’s right shoulder, his other shoulder sternly gripped by his wife. The old man glared upward as if at offensive art. Dead insects and bird droppings baked on lead-framed skylight panes, the shattered pane now purely blue. No one noticed Araby.

  A red-haired man and his gawky assistant were clipping the arborvitae bushes outside the glass enclosure. The bushes stood nine feet high at each side of the solarium door. A cliffside gazebo stood at the far end of the lawn; against the blue ocean the white gazebo made a pristine if troubling picture, like a baby carriage on an empty highway. Suddenly the red-haired man extracted something from one of the bushes and brought it into the solarium, a blue porcelain vase. “Was in the arborvitae, Miz Winston! Ain’t even scratched.” He handed the vase to Mr. Winston, who pressed his cheek to the perfect surface. “A miracle,” the old man said. “And I did it.” Then he’d seen Araby and it all became too much — throwing the vase, its rescue, now this specter in the breezeway, a girl in black like death come to get him. He’d folded himself around the vase like an athlete around the game ball. The tears he’d wept were happy.

  In the school note to her mother Araby described the sound of the ocean at night and the meals Mrs. Locke the cook prepared. She described the Winstons’ pony she rode in the afternoons, the groom, and lastly the stable boy, a retarded kid who liked her and did anything she asked. Araby didn’t describe Mr. Winston’s behavior the day of her arrival, nor his jaunt on the rooftop widow’s walk before sunrise this morning. Her mother couldn’t handle it, being in that fragile state where emotional outbursts remind one only of trouble, and where mysteries of any kind suggest trouble on the way.

  Finally, in Social Studies Araby wrote her boyfriend in New York City. An important letter, she opened it with a spot poem:

  [EXT]

  If I said close your eyes and swallow, would you?

  If I said I could fly, and follow, would you?

  I would for you.

  [EXT]

  She ended the letter, “PS — I had my period,” and beside it drew a smiley face.

  Eight

  After Robby Cochran’s arrest at the pier this morning, Del Locke had returned to desk duty at the Penscot police station. New on the force, the young cop carried himself with taut alertness possibly more anxious than vigilant. Mutterings about his earring had been stilled by his staunch manner and otherwise impeccable appearance. This summer he’d broken up several college-kid brawls and neither cursed nor mussed his shirt.

  Robby’s brother Jerome — a plain thug, was Del’s impression — had come to the station soon after the arrest, hassling Chief Rickert in the chief’s office. Robby’s wife had visited next, and Del had judged from Lois Cochran’s rainy clothes and teary red eyes that she was a heartsick woman devoted to her man. He’d set up a folding chair for her outside Robby’s cell, had been inspecting the bundle of clothes and the guitar case she’d brought when out of the corner of his eye he saw her pass Robby a pack of Lucky Strikes through the bars. Robby flushed it down the commode. “Cigarettes are drugs. I want a Bible.”

  “The Bible is drugs, Robby.”

  “Dear Lois. I’ve hurt you, I know.” The comment caused her to roll her eyes drolly at Del, enlisting the policeman, much to his shock, in a conspiracy of unuttered guffaws. Robby flared open his palm. “See the blood? Yours, mine, the guy I killed’s? It’s always been there, on every man’s hand — only now I see it plain.”

  “Get practical, Robby,” Lois said. “You need a lawyer.”

  “I already confessed.”

  Del confirmed, “Robby gave us a statement. Says he tried to run the skin diver over, plain and simple.”

  “I was high,” Robby explained. “Jesus is my lawyer now.”

  Lois withheld further comment till Del left them alone.

  The station’s two lockup cells were under the scan of a wall-mounted camera feeding to a video monitor at the front desk. Del observed Robby and Lois on the monitor as they pointed and gestured from opposite sides of the cell bars, and heard the crescendos of their argument filtering up the back corridor.

  The door to Rickert’s office opened. The chief came out with Oliver Newberry, sole witness to this morning’s fatal incident, who’d brought the body to shore before tramping to the station still dressed in his wetsuit to notify the authorities. Del panicked — in the video screen Lois covered her ears to whatever her husband was saying and dashed offscreen up the corridor leading to the front office. Chief Rickert was telling the Newberry kid he’d be able to leave Penscot after one more day of questioning. “What the hell is that!”

  Robby Cochran’s loud wail became the soundtrack to the video image that Del was watching with one eye, of a man reaching his arms through the bars of his cell in a gesture of raw need. Then Lois burst into the office from the corridor, Robby’s “I love you!” resounding as the door swung open, his words hissing after her like flames up an air shaft. Her eyes were downcast as she murmured “I’m sorry” over and over in a protective incantation, so she didn’t notice Chief Rickert and Oliver Newberry until she’d barreled into them.

  The Chief raged, “More damn visitors! And you two shouldn’t meet, period!”

  He stepped between them, but Lois and Ollie (the name his friends knew him by) each had got a good look at the other and thanks to Rickert’s reaction had a fair idea who the other was. Ollie, sixteen, wore Penscot’s old money uniform of a frayed buttondown and weatherworn khakis. His eyes, Lois saw, for they stared at her curiously over Rickert’s shoulder, were a translucent blue just like Jerome Cochran’s, a color Matthew Priam, expert in such things, likened to glacial ice and so called them, dramatically, killer’s eyes, a description figurative in most cases.

  “You okay?” Ollie said, but before Lois could ask him the same question, Del hustled her out of the station. Outside, he refused to divulge the kid’s name to her. “As soon as we get what we need from him, he’s leaving Penscot for prep school. We don’t want your brother-in-law breaking his legs.”

  Lois laughed. “I only ask ’cause he’s cute, dontcha think?” She put a lewd spin on her words just to watch Del blush, which to his chagrin he couldn’t suppress.

  Del’s mother wept. “I never dreamed he could do such a thing.” Del, standing beside her recliner in the parlor of the small house where they lived
together, a fiftyish woman and her two grown sons, removed his rain-spattered blue jacket, its police badge shining like tin foil. “He was an animal,” Mrs. Locke said. A plastic ice pack covered her face. “Vicious. You saw.”

  “I saw.”

  “It’s a nightmare. A mother’s nightmare.”

  Del felt guilty for his distraction from his mother’s distress, but the whole scene at the police station earlier eclipsed for the moment his usual deep worry over tensions between his mother and younger brother. Robby readily had confessed to running over the diver poaching his lobster traps. Moreover, he’d said the act had changed his life for the better. As the dope wore off and the fact sank in that he’d actually probably killed someone, the grace of heaven had poured over him like a cleansing shower, Robby said — he went so far as to claim the five whales he’d seen after the incident were agents sent by God. Most of the cops had doubted all this, of course. But Del wasn’t prepared to rule it out. He was a closet homosexual currently, contritely celibate. His sympathy for people in turmoil, even fools like Robby, was beginning to veer out of control.

  “Johnwayne didn’t mean it,” he said to his mother, using his brother’s nickname. “It’s a phase. Becoming a man, right?”

  “His name is Marcus.”

  “He doesn’t like Marcus. He likes Johnwayne.” When she winced he laughed.

  “Delbert!” The ice pack slid off her face. Her left eye had been blackened. Her younger son had done it last evening. She’d retrieved from his room an article he cherished and he’d set her straight at once. Del had come home to screams, his brother above her, flailing at her head. Mrs. Locke replaced the ice and started to sob. “The violence of it. I pray I don’t go that way. To die terrified, I don’t deserve that.”

  “No one does. You want the TV on?”

  “No I don’t want the TV on!”

  He turned it on anyway. “Watch,” he commanded, and with one dull eye, she obeyed.

  Del liked feeling thin, and for lunch had tuna and spring-water. He went upstairs to his brother’s room, which was a temple to The Duke in specific and to cowboys in general. The walls were adorned with pictures of John Wayne. The bedspread had a slaughtered Indian motif. On the bureau next to a transistor radio was a notepad in which, with illiterate hieroglyphs, the boy recorded the bad news of the world. Each day, full of morning headlines, he gave mother and brother garbled reports of who famous had died last night, what storm was coming, what war was imminent. He relished the gasps they supplied. Marcus “Johnwayne” Locke was mentally handicapped — the mind of a ten-year-old, a doctor once said. Tragedy to him was measured in audience response.

  Del removed from the bureau’s top drawer a woman’s blue satin nightgown. Of fine quality, lace at the bodice and hem, this was the article Mrs. Locke had repossessed from Johnwayne yesterday. At night the boy stuffed it with pillows and hugged it as he slept; sometimes he masturbated with it. His mother was revolted.

  The gown was crusted with obvious secretions. Del filled the bathroom sink with water and kneaded the fabric clean, wringing it into crinkly dampness and hanging it before Johnwayne’s window. A boudoir scarecrow to see it now, the gown as it dried would assume its pale blue shine. Del turned off the light and closed the door. He loved his brother more than anything.

  His mother was watching TV, laughing now. “Stay out of his room,” Del told her. He put on his jacket.

  “You look so smart in that uniform. And you’re doing such good work. Penscot needs enforcers like you.”

  “I’d rather be a movie star.”

  “Silly. Movie stars are wild types. You’re my son and I love you, but wild you’re not.”

  “What about work? You called in sick.” Mrs. Locke cooked for the Winstons out on Oceanside Point. American royalty, she liked to imagine them — first in God’s eyes or first to the guillotine, depending on how well they ate of the dishes she prepared.

  “Mrs. Winston won’t need me till Saturday. She wants to give a party for that girl staying with her. Miss Araby. The child’s bored, she says.”

  “I can drive Johnwayne there till you’re better. I’ll get one of the workers to drop him back at the station later.” Like his mother, Del’s brother worked at the Winston estate — in the stables, mucking horse stalls and polishing tack. “I’ll keep him with me this afternoon.” When Mrs. Locke snorted huffily he warned, “Do you hear me? Stay out of his room.”

  “It won’t matter. He’ll be the death of me.”

  “You’ll live forever.”

  Her tone shifted willfully. “What news from the front?”

  “Well, we got Robby Cochran in lockup. He killed somebody, maybe on purpose. His wife brought him his guitar and now we’ve got our own Leadbelly. Johnwayne’ll love it.” Del moved to the door.

  She lifted her face. “A kiss before you go.”

  He obeyed.

  Nine

  Students swarmed into the parking lot at the last bell. The mist obscuring the cars and buses was exhaust and drizzle mixed. Some kids waited under the building eave, Brendan Cochran among them. A lot of girls walked by here, and the weather today had been just chill enough to warrant wearing his father’s old field jacket, which, though it fit him like a house, to Brendan had style far surpassing anything civilian. He propped his elbow on the wall and gazed heartily about him. He’d completely forgotten his promise to meet Amy, of the big beckoning breasts, after school.

  His friend Ernie Flipp came up behind him, lugging a football equipment bag. “We scrimmage today. You gonna come watch.”

  “Jerome’s got me working.”

  “What’s with this Jerome shit? My old man says its snobbery, like Jerry’s not good enough anymore.”

  “It’s middle age, I think.”

  “Like havin’a new dad.”

  “I wish.”

  Araby Munro pushed through the exit doors. Her coat was a pancho-thing shiny as black cellophane. “That girl looks like a vampire,” Ernie said.

  “I dunno. I’d experiment with sex with her anytime.”

  Araby turned her back to the wind and lit a cigarette. The smoke sifting from her nostrils was something out of the movies: girl in the rain on a street corner, who says, “Could one of you boys show me the Oceanside bus.” The two of them pointed. Araby adjusted her hood and hopped over a puddle, her cigarette cupped in her hand. Then the strangest thing happened.

  As if on cue a stooped young man led a pony from behind the buses to straight in front of Araby, who recoiled in surprise. He and the pony were drenched. Rivulets spilled off his big cowboy hat, down the reins, down the pony’s nose and its matted roan belly. Hooves clopped on asphalt. People flocked in wonder around the sight. In quiet rebuke the pony’s ears lay back.

  Araby covered her eyes. “Marcus. What are you doing here?”

  The young man, who but for his height looked very much a boy, offered her the reins. “You shay you wan’ ride home.” Kids pressed closer to hear.

  “I was kidding, Marcus. You know, a joke?”

  His eyes darted furtively. “You shay.”

  Araby sighed. “Me say, right.”

  “Not say,” someone laughed. “Shay.”

  Marcus Locke removed his hat and blinked away raindrops. He was the stable boy at the Winston estate, where Araby was living. Yesterday Araby, following her afternoon ride, had said wouldn’t it be cool to ride her pony home from school. Marcus had believed her. Now he sipped blood from biting the wall of his mouth.

  “Marcus,” she chided him, “this is a bad thing you’ve done.”

  He stared at the reins in his hand. Retarded from birth, he wore the amazed expression of one who’s seen his contemporaries leave him behind, seen them learn to drive and talk to girls, who comprehends unfairness as an infant comprehends the closing of a nursery door. And he had a speech impediment
. When words came they often were peppered with garbled profanity — his try at acquired adulthood. Marcus lived a life wholly inner and didn’t complain, though awareness of his isolation was probably why he preferred to be called by his self-chosen nickname, derived from the lord of masculine American solitude, a preference most islanders were happy to grant.

  “Sure we’ll ride, Johnwayne.” Brendan stepped forward and took Araby’s arm. “We want to.”

  “What!”

  “We’re gonna ride this horse, you and me. Johnwayne’ll lead us. Right, Johnwayne?”

  At the sound of his name he blossomed. “Yup!”

  Araby protested. “I don’t need to be led! I ride very well.”

  Brendan dragged her to the pony’s side as Johnwayne held it steady. “Up.” She put her foot in the stirrup and swung into the English saddle. Brendan gave her his knapsack, grabbed her waist and hiked into position behind her, half on the saddle, half off. The pony skidded sideways. “Will this thing hold us?”

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  The crowd formed a channel. Johnwayne led the pony toward the woods beyond the parking lot. Like a buckskin scout he scanned the path ahead, treading toe first on pine needles and loam. Araby was a damsel he’d saved, a city gal who maybe could learn to love this lonesome cowpoke. Her friend was harder to cast. Johnwayne wished he’d lay crossways on the pony’s back the way a dead Indian should.

  Araby’s words to Brendan were muffled by her hood. She drew it back and her dry hair flicked his face. His nose was at the nape of her neck. “I guess it’s better than him having a scene.”

  “You’re welcome,” Brendan said. Sensing its homeward direction, the pony quickened its pace. The rolling action began to irritate, and Brendan pulled himself against Araby. “Have to,” he apologized. “The saddle kinda gets me in the wrong place.”

  “Really?” she said. “It’s the opposite for me.”

  Far behind them the girl named Amy was watching them move through the trees. Delayed after class for her rendezvous with Brendan, she’d rushed out soon as she could and stood now coat open in the parking lot. She recognized Brendan by his field jacket, recalling from last year how floppy and cute he looked in it. The image of him, his companions and the pony, was something out of a fairy tale, a hint of quests and romance in the misty wood they vanished in. Amy had recently got her braces off. Out of new habit she sucked air sharply over her white unjacketed teeth. The sensation made her eyes water, hurting a little.