by D. W. Buffa
He meant it, and I knew it, and I could never let it happen.
“All right,” I said with a rueful glance, “I’ll do it. But only after the psychologist sees Danny.”
“He’ll do it first thing tomorrow.”
“You said you hadn’t talked to him yet.”
“I haven’t,” he replied as if that was an answer. “This will be a great experience for you,” he said cheerfully. We turned and began to walk and he again put his arm around my shoulder. “You remember that time Jeffries put you in jail for the weekend? Look at it like that: You might not like it much, but think of all the stories you’ll have to tell.”
I thought about that after I left him at the corner and headed back to the office: not what it would be like to pass myself off as one of the homeless, but what it had been like spending three nights in the county jail. Three nights—and I had never forgotten it! One weekend all those years ago, and as vivid as if it had happened last week or the week before. Three nights! How many nights are there in twelve years, the length of time Elliott Winston had already spent locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane? I could list the numbers and make a rough estimate of the result, but I could not do the multiplication, not in my head, not without a calculator or at least a pencil and paper. If I had been at the state hospital I could have asked Elliott’s friend, the former high school history teacher somehow given the gift for mathematics by his own insanity.
Somewhere behind me a voice called my name. I stopped and turned around, but I did not see anyone I recognized among the crowd of faces that moved past me on the sidewalk. The voice called again, but I still could not find who it was.
“Here,” Jennifer said, laughing. She was sitting in her car, parked at the curb just a few feet away. The top was down. “You looked like you were in a trance. Have you been sleepwalking?”
“No,” I replied, embarrassed. I took a step toward the car, then stopped and looked back over my shoulder. We were directly in front of my building. If she had not called out to me, I might have walked right past it.
“You told me to pick you up in front at quarter past five,” she said as I got in. “Did you forget?”
“No, I didn’t forget. I was thinking about something.” As we drove off, I remembered the look—that trancelike look—Elliott had on his face when I first saw him at the hospital. “You ever do that?” I asked her. “Think about something and forget where you are?”
Jennifer glanced across at me, a puzzled expression on her face.
“I don’t mean when you were sick,” I said, touching the back of her neck. But I realized that that was exactly what I meant.
“Is that what it’s like—you don’t know where you are?”
She looked straight ahead, steering through the downtown traffic. Dressed in a white short-sleeve blouse and a green and blue cotton skirt, she looked young and pretty, eighteen years old all over again, and both of us certain that nothing bad could ever happen. A faint smile flickered across her mouth. She lifted her head and bit her lip; and then she turned to me and her eyes seemed to beg forgiveness. “I can’t,” she murmured.
She stared ahead at the road, and with a quick turn of her wrist shifted down to the next gear and gunned the car through a yellow light at the intersection just before the bridge.
I tried to get her mind off the past. “We’re passing over my new home,” I said brightly.
She passed the back of her hand over her eyes and cleared her throat. “What?” she asked, forcing herself to smile.
“Yeah, it’s true,” I said with a cocky grin. “It’s my new home.
Right down there,” I added, jabbing my finger in front of her.
“Under the bridge. It’s Flynn’s idea.”
Jennifer listened intently while I explained what I was going to do and why there did not seem to be any other choice. I was not quite prepared for her response. Instead of trying to talk me out of it; instead of telling me how much she was going to worry about me; instead of reminding me that I was a lawyer and not a private detective; she thought it was a perfectly wonderful idea and tried to invite herself along.
“If you just suddenly show up—I don’t care how much of a homeless person you make yourself look—you’re still a stranger and they’re not going to trust you. But if there are two of us—a homeless couple—that makes sense. It happens all the time. You see couples holding up cardboard signs saying they’ll work for food. We could be like that,” she said eagerly.
On the other side of the bridge, her eyes darting all around, she merged into the freeway traffic and then crossed over into the lane that, a little farther on, connected to the highway that led east along the Columbia.
It was out of the question. She was not going with me. “It’s too dangerous,” I said quietly, and then started to laugh at the way I sounded, all self-assured and protective, as if it had been my idea instead of Flynn’s.
She waited until I stopped. “So you rather I went alone?”
“Flynn told me I had to do it. By the way, where are we going?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I thought maybe we could drive out along the river, maybe go a ways into the gorge.”
We drove along the shore of the great slow-moving river as it cut its way through the tree-covered cliffs of the gorge, changing color from gray to silver and then, finally, as the sun slanted in the stillness of dusk across the far edge of the horizon, a deep purple mixed with gold. The river ran forever, through the rough red rocks of the high windblown desert; through wheat fields that flowed under a yellow sun and cloudless skies and clear starry nights in places where a tree had never grown; through high mountains that had risen from the earth thousands of years after the river had already begun to run out to the sea; through the flatlands and lowlying hills where another river joined and where a city had been built and a handful of generations had lived their lives and died their deaths. Always changing and always the same, the river carried us back and carried us forward, and gave us the feeling that though we could never quite put it into words, we knew something important, something that had value.
We stopped at a restaurant with a view of a narrow steel suspension bridge and the green black hills of Washington on the other side. We ate hamburgers that came in red plastic baskets covered with white wax paper and slapped ketchup over the French fries and drank Cokes out of Coke glasses with straws.
Every few minutes, Jennifer would reach across and wipe my mouth with her paper napkin.
“You sure you want to do this? Get married in a year?”
Holding it with both hands, her teeth had just sunk into the hamburger. “Why?” she asked, almost choking as she swallowed hard and tried not to laugh. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“Second thoughts? I haven’t had first thoughts. I’ve been in love with you all my life, but until you came back I didn’t think about it very often. It’s like breathing. Most of the time you don’t know you’re doing it.”
Her hands were in her lap under the table, and she was looking up at me, making fun of me with her eyes, while she drank Coke through a straw. She finished what little was left in the glass and kept sucking on it, laughing with her eyes at the sound she made, waiting to see my reaction. I signaled the waitress to bring her a new one.
“Got a quarter?” Jennifer asked. I found one in my pocket and she went to the old-fashioned jukebox that stood against the wall on the other side. I watched her tap her foot as she searched for something she wanted to hear. She came back to the table and held out her hand. I looked around, hesitant. “Come on,” she insisted.
” ‘Chances Are’?” I asked, laughing quietly as we began to dance on the linoleum floor in front of the jukebox.
We moved together to the music, a few steps one way and a few steps back. She let go of my hand and wrapped both arms around my neck, and both of mine went around her waist. At a booth a few feet away, two teenage boys nudged each other. The girls they were with first scold
ed them with their eyes so they wouldn’t laugh and then, because they were young and sentimental and still dreamed that love could last, turned and watched themselves.
When it was over, Jennifer went to the cash register, got change for a dollar, and played it again. She wanted to do it a third time, but I pulled her away and we went back to our table and she drank some more Coke and teased me again with her wide laughing eyes.
“It wasn’t like breathing for me,” she said, peering down at the glass as she twisted the straw through crushed ice. “I thought about you much more often than that. I thought about you a lot when I was in the hospital.” She raised her eyes until her gaze met mine. “I tried to think of why I was there. They told me it was because of some chemical imbalance in the brain, that it was something physical, that it could happen to anyone. But it didn’t happen to anyone: It happened to me—and I kept thinking maybe it wouldn’t have happened if my life had been different, if I’d been married to someone I was in love with. How could I have been depressed if I had been happy?” She paused and, reaching across the table, ran her fingertips down the side of my face. “I kept thinking I wouldn’t be there, in that awful place, if I’d been married to you.”
Slowly, her head came up straight and she sat perfectly erect, and perfectly still. “Is that what you want, Joey?” she asked, measuring each word. “After all this time. Are you sure that’s what you want—just to be with me?”
I nodded toward her nearly empty glass. “Drink your Coke. We have to get out of here. It’s a long drive home.”
I waited until she bent her head over the glass and took the tip of the straw in her mouth.
“I’m going to ask you this just once. Will you marry me? Not next year, or next month. Just, will you marry me?”
Her eyes still on the glass, she began to smile. Then she looked up.
“Yes.”
That is all that was said, all that had to be said. We sat there for a few more minutes while she finished her Coke and I wondered why marriage, as opposed to simply living together, had assumed such an importance in my mind. We were past the age when marriage meant children. Perhaps it was a way to show defiance to the long years we had been apart. I suppose it would also put a period to the sentence that would seem to strangers to explain our lives: “We fell in love, and then we were married.”
Jennifer finished her Coke, and I helped her up from the table.
“We can always tell people we had a very long engagement,” she said with a smile. Suddenly, her head shuddered and her eyes flashed with pain. She gripped my hand with all her strength.
“I’m all right,” she said, trying to apologize. “I’m just tired, and it hit me kind of fast.”
By the time we got to the car, she seemed fine, but when I insisted on driving she did not object. As we drove through the darkness, she curled up beside me and was fast asleep before we had gone more than a mile.
The next morning, Helen, as usual, followed me into my office, a high-heeled tap dance accompanied by shouted instructions about what I was supposed to be doing.
“I finally reached Dr. Friedman’s office down at the state hospital. He’s out of town this week and won’t be back until Monday. I said we’d call back.” Helen looked at her notebook and found the next item on her list. “The records clerk called from the courthouse. The file on the Elliott Winston case came over from Archives. You can look at it anytime you want.” Her eyes went back to the notebook.
“I’m getting married, Helen.”
“Somebody named … ?” She looked up, puzzled, and for a moment searched my eyes. The tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and the lines at the corners of her mouth seemed to fade away.
She dropped into the chair and put her hand on her heart.
“Really?” she asked. Her eyes sparkled and a huge grin spread across her face. “To the girl you wanted to marry, years ago, the one you went to high school with?”
I could not remember ever having told her about that, but it did not surprise me that she knew. She started to say something and then, changing her mind, came around the desk and kissed me on the cheek. There was an awkward silence, and then, because that kiss had said everything there was to say, she offered a few words of congratulations and I replied with a few words of thanks.
“I have a lot to do today,” I said finally. “I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to see that file or not. Would you call the records clerk back and ask if they would hang on to it for a while.”
A few minutes later, I heard Helen on the phone. There was one thing I could find out without going to the courthouse and reading it in the file. I picked up the line and asked the records clerk to tell me the name of the attorney who had represented Elliott Winston. She told me and I asked once more to make sure I had heard her right, and one more time after that because I still did not believe it.
“But Asa Bartram never practiced criminal law in his life,” I said, as if this was something the clerk would either know or have reason to care about.
“Sorry,” I said, more baffled than ever by what had happened, and more certain than ever that it was somehow the answer to everything.
Twenty-one
_______
Now that we were to be married, Jennifer moved in with me and we spent five days alone together, trying not to talk too much about the things we had missed. Middle-aged, all the glam-our gone, we spent the passion we had left and learned the gentler sentiments of love.
Early the next Sunday evening we left the house I would never again live in alone and drove down the long sloping driveway, through the open iron gate to the street below. She could not stop laughing.
“You look just awful!”
“This is how I earn my living,” I said, deadpan. “The law is a noble profession.”
“Try going to court looking like that.”
“I did—once,” I replied.
She nodded. “The time you went to jail. I wasn’t there to see it, but—trust me—you look a lot worse now. You’ll probably get picked up by the police and put in jail again.”
She drove me into town and dropped me off on a dark corner next to a small park, a block away from a mission where the homeless could sometimes get a meal and a bed.
“Are you going to be warm enough?” she asked as I opened the door. “There’s a chill in the air. It’s going to get cold tonight.”
She stared at me with large, melancholy eyes. “Look at you! We haven’t even lived together a week, and you don’t shave, you dress like a bum, and you make up the most outrageous excuse any woman ever heard about why you have to spend the night away from home.”
“You going to be all right?” I asked as I leaned over to kiss her goodbye.
She held me for a long time, laughing quietly about how rough my face felt with its scraggly five-day growth, teasing me that I smelled too good to pass for homeless. When she was certain I did not want to go, she pretended she did not mind and with one last kiss let me leave. With my hands shoved into the pockets of an old, ragged, oversize wool coat, I watched her drive away and then, when she was gone, turned around and walked slowly into the night.
There was at first a feeling of adventure, like someone starting out on a voyage, when danger and hardship still seem like a romance, and hunger and thirst are things you talk about on a full stomach. I was doing this to find out what I could about who had killed Quincy Griswald and then given the murder weapon to someone who would not be able to explain where it had come from. But deep down I also wanted to know what it was like to live like this: homeless and abandoned, surrounded by things you could not have and people who, when they saw you coming, would cross the street to get away.
It was not yet completely dark. A man and a woman coming from the opposite direction saw me and moved as far away on the sidewalk as they could. I went right for them and held out my hand.
“Spare change?” I asked in a harsh, rasping voice. My head rolled to the side and my chin sagged
down to my chest. “Haven’t had anything to eat all day,” I said, pleading with my eyes.
He did what I probably would have done. He put his arm around her and tried to shelter her with his shoulder. She was pretty and well dressed, and as they hurried past she looked at me with loathing and disgust.
I had gotten away with it and I felt a thrill of exhilaration.
“All right,” I yelled after them in my normal voice, “if you don’t have any change, how about the keys to the BMW?”
The man shot a glance at me over his shoulder and then quickened his step, afraid I might follow.
I crossed the street to the mission and studied the dead eyes of the men who were sprawled against the front brick wall near the entrance, waiting for it to open, as I walked past them and turned the corner. Cheap hotels with dirty windows and dimly lit bars with shadows sliding slowly across the floor; hookers in short tight dresses and junkies with vapid smug smiles and pockmarked faces; fat men with fat wallets ready to buy a good time, and haggard tired women no one wanted trying to forget they had no one waiting at home: This was the world I now entered instead of my own.
In an alleyway behind an adult bookstore I rummaged through the trash cans and watched the people who came in and out the back entrance, and realized I had become invisible. A girl in a black leather miniskirt led a short, paunchy man out the door, watched with calculating eyes while he counted out the money, tucked it in her bra, and then got down on her knees in front of him and did what she had been paid for. When she finished, she watched him walk nervously down the alley toward the sidewalk, and then turned to me, searching through the garbage less than ten feet away.
“I’ll bet you wish you could have some,” she said with a smirk, and then disappeared inside.
I had just bent down to look inside the next garbage can when, suddenly, I went flying over it, and landed in a heap on the other side, buried under the trash that collapsed on top of me. Twisting around, I pulled my head up, tried to get to my feet, and was shoved back. A hulking wreck of a human being, with stinking breath and a slobbering mouth that looked like it bred corrup-tion, was waving his arm at me and pointing a finger at his chest.
