The Summers smiled and nodded until the boy ran out of steam.
Dick said, “Fine boy you have there.”
“Real fine,” Charlotte put in.
“He likes dabbling with things,” Dick said.
“Couldn’t get him away from that old pickup,” Charlotte added.
“Fascinated him,” Dick said.
“He’s never seen one that old, Dick, that’s why.”
Louise smiled. “Won’t you come inside?”
The old people looked at each other. Charlotte said, “Can’t stay. Not really. I’ve got something in the oven. Got to keep an eye on it. Hate it when something burns.”
“We thought we’d introduce ourselves.” Dick shrugged loosely. He winked at Dennis. “Brought you a small offering.”
“You shouldn’t,” Louise said.
“Nonsense. It’s nothing.” Charlotte produced an old china dish, over which had been stretched a slice of aluminum foil. Her wrinkled fingers, which were bulbous with arthritis, swollen at the joints, pulled the foil away. “Fudge. Did it myself. Always do my own cooking. Can’t trust stores these days. Store-bought foods are filled with additives. Mono-this and sodium-that. Who wants to eat that trash? Not me.”
“Nor me,” said Dick.
Max reached out and raised the dish to his face and made a show of sniffing. “Smells terrific,” he said.
“Wait till you taste it,” Dennis said.
“It’s really very kind of you,” and Louise smiled, because the two old faces—these two occupants of what Frog called Wrinkle City—were clearly waiting for her approval. “I’m sure it’s delicious.”
Charlotte scratched the side of her nose. “Been meaning to ask for my pie dishes back.”
“You baked the pies?” Louise asked.
“Surely did.”
“They were delightful. I wasn’t sure where they had come from, which was why I didn’t return the dishes. I thought maybe the cleaners had left them.” Louise looked at the couple. It was utterly impossible to estimate their ages—they could have been anywhere between seventy and ninety. Only their eyes, trapped in those two worn faces, seemed to suggest life. And then she wondered if they had a key to this house or if the place was left unlocked even when nobody occupied it. What did it matter? This was the country and people here were real neighbors who didn’t bolt their doors and turn on their burglar alarms the way they did in paranoid San Francisco.
“I really must thank you for your kindness.”
Dennis went indoors to fetch the pie dishes.
Louise said, “I hope he wasn’t any trouble to you.”
Dick laughed. The sound reminded Louise of air escaping from a steam pipe. “He can come over whenever he likes. We don’t get visitors up here. It’s nice to have somebody young around the place. It gets way too quiet sometimes. He’s a good kid.”
“Fine boy,” Charlotte said. “Anytime you folks want a night out on the town, you talk to us. We’ll baby-sit him. Even if he isn’t what you’d exactly call a baby.”
Both Dick and Charlotte laughed this time. Hers was a girlish sound, clear and strong and melodic. It emerged incongruously from her face. The small mouth opened, revealing small yellowish teeth and pale gums. The old couple laughed in unison, as if they had infected each other with mirth. Louise had the impression of two people who had become uncannily attuned to one another’s lives—mind readers picking up on every little nuance.
“That’s really good of you,” Louise said. “Maybe we’ll take you up on that some night.”
“Very kind,” Max added. “A very kind offer.”
Dennis came out with the dishes. As he handed them to Charlotte, Dick Summer patted him on the head a couple of times. Dennis, who normally would have been embarrassed by this kind of gesture, didn’t seem to mind. He accepted the pats the way a dog might.
“Nothing to it,” Charlotte said. “Only thing, we don’t have a telephone. You’d have to walk over. About a half mile.”
“More like three quarters,” Dick said.
“I’m sure we’ll come and visit you sometime.” Louise leaned against the rail of the porch. She glanced at Charlotte’s hands—they might have been two artifacts badly carved out of pinewood. They suggested pain, restricted movement. The fingers were thick, the knuckles twisted. As if she were conscious of Louise’s gaze, the old woman concealed her hands under the pie dishes. Louise looked away.
“Have you been living up here long?” Max asked.
“Stopped counting the years ages ago,” Charlotte answered.
“Too depressing,” Dick said. “The way they keep rushing past. Hell, who wants to count time?”
“That’s a healthy attitude,” Max remarked.
There was a moment of silence now. The Summers were smiling at Dennis. The boy stood between the couple, framed by their old bodies.
“Well,” Louise said. “Are you sure you don’t want coffee or maybe a beer—”
“Another time,” Charlotte said. “Got to get back and check that oven. Burned things don’t taste so good.” Charlotte laid a hand on Dennis’s shoulder, rubbing it slowly. “We’ll look forward to seeing you real soon. All of you.”
The Summers turned away together. Louise watched them go. As they reached the corner of the house they did something she found oddly touching and yet somehow a little strange—they grasped each other’s hands and walked away, swinging their arms like two teenagers experiencing love’s first shy connection.
When they were gone she turned to Max and said, “Romantic.”
“It’s the only word for it,” Max said.
“Nice.” Louise slung an arm around Dennis’s shoulder and drew the boy against her side. “I like your new friends, Denny.”
“Me too,” he said, disentangling himself from his mother’s arm and vanishing inside the house.
13
From beyond the bathroom door Metger could hear the sound of his wife, Nora, talking to him. Because the door was closed, she had her voice raised a little higher than usual. He was barely listening. He looked at this face in the mirror; his lack of color appalled him. He filled the washbasin with cold water and plunged his face into it, opening his eyes under the surface.
“Charlie Badecker called when you were out, Jer … something about a life insurance payment … told him you’d call back … your father called—”
“My father?” Metger asked through the closed door. The old man rarely called from the nursing home and when he did he always sounded confused, as if uncertain of whom he was talking to, and suspicious of the instrument at the same time. “What did he say?”
“He didn’t make a whole lot of sense, Jerry.”
Metger turned the thought of his father around in his mind a moment. Because the sight of the man—who was once so vital, so alert—depressed Jerry Metger, he didn’t visit his father as often as he should have and he felt guilty about it. He tried, and always failed, to justify his neglect. I’m too busy. I have a pregnant wife to take care of. There’s the spare bedroom I’m trying to knock into a nursery. None of these excuses worked for long. The guilt always came back like a nagging tide.
His father had been one of those figures people say are larger than life. Everything Stanley had ever done he did to excess and with the gusto of a man to whom life is a splendid array of appetites to satisfy. And stories, Metger thought, always stories. Metger’s childhood had been filled with tales and legends of old Carnarvon that the elder Metger relayed in his characteristic animated fashion. Some of the stories were whoppers. Others were simply exaggerations concerning the way Welsh settlers had lived here, amazing narratives of deprivation and hardship. Most of those stories kept changing in the retelling. It didn’t matter. Metger Senior always told them with a tremendous relish that suggested authenticity, and Jerry—wide-eyed, listening intently—swallowed it all without question.
Now, as Metger pulled his dripping face out of the water, he remembered from somew
here in his colorful, crowded childhood his father’s tale of a boy who had died in a highly unusual way—but the recollection was vague and confusing to him, as most of his father’s stories had become over the years. In this case it was nothing more than a whisper that faded into silence whenever he tried to pin it down.
A boy, he thought. The name eluded him. But he linked it somehow in his mind with the death, twelve years ago, of Anthea Ackerley.
And then there was something else. There had been a kid in his first-grade class who had attended school for maybe a week before they’d taken him away. Robert Hann, that had been the kid’s name. Bobby. Nobody knew where he’d gone. A sick boy. A terrible sickness.
Odd links. Connections. Threads so pale they could hardly be seen.
He shook his head. Sometimes he wanted to laugh at himself, at the suspicious turns of his own mind. Somehow he couldn’t do it, couldn’t release it that simply. A phase, Metger thought. This stuff concerning the redwood house and his father’s half-remembered stories and the kid known as Bobby Hann—all this was a phase.
You’ll get over it. When? Tell me when. It’s been twelve years already.
He thought of Miles Henderson now. That old fart knew something, more than he was prepared to say, but there was no way of getting inside his pickled head to find out for sure. Henderson didn’t want to look back into the past these days. He had closed the doors on all those rooms. He had locked them. But he knew something—Metger was convinced of that much.
Metger buried his face in the folds of a towel, then he checked to make sure the door was locked. Satisfied, he climbed up on the toilet and raised his hands to the air-conditioning grille near the ceiling.
He paused. This is something you don’t need, Metger. Balanced on the toilet, he pressed his face against the wall. A phase, he thought again. That was charitable. There was another word: “obsession.”
He took out a pocket knife and used it to remove the screws of the air conditioning grille. Then he reached inside the vent; his fingers encountered an eight-by-ten manila envelope. He undid the metal clasp and looked inside. There they were—photographs that had been taken by a disinterested police photographer twelve years ago. Photographs of Jerry Metger’s obsession.
Suddenly he could feel the same old rain soak through his clothes and between his hands was the sodden butt of an extinguished cigarette and then he was walking through the wet pines and staring upward at an empty balcony and hearing the sound of a gunshot all over again.
Then they weren’t just pictures anymore, they weren’t mere recordings of past events, he was standing inside that room of death and he was looking at that girl and he was trying, Christ he was trying, to make some sense out of it all like a man who stares at a puzzle and knows it can never come out quite right no matter how hard and long he works at it.
Nora was tapping on the bathroom door. “Jerry, you okay in there?”
“Fine,” he answered. He stuck the pictures back inside the envelope. He replaced the envelope in the air vent. He felt like some sad old man who hid a collection of pornography from his wife.
“You sure?”
“Really,” he answered.
But not really, he thought. Not fine at all.
He opened the bathroom door and looked across the room at Nora, who was folding clean clothes, placing them in tidy little piles. Metger’s here. Her own there. She was huge in her pregnancy and she looked strangely satisfied by her condition, as if she shared some enormous secret with the child inside her.
“You’re pale,” she said. She was a tall woman, almost as tall as Metger himself.
Metger moved toward the bed and sat down.
Louise and Max Untermeyer. And their kid.
He shouldn’t have gone out there today. He shouldn’t have bothered it all over again. It was old, a bleached bone, it should have been buried back there in the past the way he had buried so many of his dad’s old narratives. But he had a grim sense that he was doomed to keep on making the same resurrection time and time again—a man digging a hole that never gets any deeper no matter how furiously he shovels.
Nora came across the room and sat down beside him.
He held her hand in his own and smiled at her. He didn’t like himself for hiding the photographs from her, for keeping those old pictures in a secret place where she couldn’t find them and be disturbed by them. What you need to remember, he told himself, is that this is your reality right here. This woman. The unborn child inside her. This is all that matters.
But even as he thought this he was filled with a curious, damp dread.
14
It was early morning and there was both sun and moon in the sky simultaneously. Frog had slipped out of his VW and, dressed only in cutoff blue jeans and a sweatshirt, he jogged.
It was the most tedious exercise ever designed. The reason Frog bothered with it was some hangover from the days when he’d been a health-food freak. Now, since he didn’t indulge in a diet anymore, since he had given up eating like a squirrel, jogging was the only thing he did that seemed remotely calculated to promote well-being.
Even then he wasn’t sure if it really helped. He sweated some and his body ached and he felt as if he were melting like a wax candle inside his sweatshirt and the soles of his feet burned—what was so goddamn wonderful about all that? It was the aftermath, he supposed, when you collapsed in a heap and lay there—your heart banging away like a drum and your eyes popping out of your head—and you just felt good. You could brag to yourself about how you’d just run twenty miles, even though you knew it was only ten at the most. Joggers, like fishermen, boast cheerfully and lie without scruples.
Jogging was the pits. He puffed down through the trees and hit the dirt road. His ankles were weakening and perspiration was already soaking through his shirt and creating a tiny puddle around his crotch. Blood beat inside his head and small spots danced in front of his eyes. Way to go, Frog, he thought. This is the life, huh?
When you jogged your mind acted peculiarly. Odd little thoughts popped in out of nowhere. Mildewed memories reared themselves up and you thought of people and places you hadn’t pondered in years. Now, his feet pounding the surface of the dirt road, he remembered the night on the commune when—so many fucking years ago!—he had swallowed LSD and assumed the stance of a frog and gone hopping down through the bulrushes to the edge of a stream where he’d rebbitted all through the hours of darkness, attracting a variety of toads and frogs to his throaty call. Back then it had been easy to believe that you’d become a form of reptilian life, at one with the currents of the stream and the whisper of the rushes and the night sounds of every living thing.
Which was all just so much Zen shit to him these days.
Frog. As Louise Untermeyer said, it could have been worse. Imagine a maggot.
He reached the redwood house. He was losing his breath rapidly. He noticed Denny moving down the path toward him. An early riser, Frog thought. Sweat ran into his eyes.
“Frog!” the kid called out.
“Can’t stop.” Frog was unable to speak coherently; imminent collapse was on him. “Miles to go. Do I look stupid or what?”
Denny fell in beside him for a hundred yards. It galled Frog that the kid ran so gracefully.
“Can’t talk,” Frog said. “Out of wind.”
Dennis moved without effort. “You want company?”
“Sorry. Always. Run. Alone.” Frog groaned. He felt his skeleton rattle around inside his body. Actually, he might have been glad of company, but he couldn’t put up with the shame of having this kid watch him fall into an untidy pile at the end of the run.
“No problem,” the kid said in a knowing kind of way. “See you later.”
“Right.” And Frog was gone, trying to sprint for the boy’s benefit, up through the trees and out in the direction of the Summers’ house. When he glanced back once, Denny was shaking his head, as if the sight of a forty-three-year-old ex-hippy jogging through a forest
was lamentable.
Up and up into the trees. He wondered if Denny thought he was rude, refusing his company that way. What the hell. He’d make it up somehow later. Meantime, he was approaching the clearing where the Summers’ property line began.
He staggered against a tree and fell down flat on his back and lay gazing at the sky, thinking he would die out here. Coronary infarction. His chest heaved and his lungs felt like two old furry mittens filled with mildewed air. With an enormous effort, he hauled himself up into a sitting position. He peered through the foliage of some shrubbery. Across the clearing, beyond the piles of junk the Summers seemed indecently attached to, he could see the small log house. Thin smoke rose out of the chimney. The windows were in shadow, dark glass reflecting nothing. Lying flat on his stomach now, Frog observed the porch, a ramshackle affair that tilted at one end.
The Summers, barely visible in the shadows, sat on deck chairs. The man smoked a pipe, which he sometimes tapped against the handrail of the porch. The woman was apparently crocheting something. They were unaware of his presence.
I spy, Frog thought. Why did the Summers interest him anyhow? Was it because they were all fellow travelers in solitude, in rustic loneliness? There was a certain serenity to the view Frog watched, the way there is something comforting in a Norman Rockwell illustration. Two old folks, eccentric in the way all old people have the right to be, enjoying the sunset years of their life together. Frog experienced a twinge, thinking of himself alone in the VW. Old Graybeard, the Madman of the Forest. Tourists would drive out to take his picture and there would be a presidential telegram on his hundredth birthday. Ah, blissful solitude.
The man set his pipe down. At precisely the same moment the woman laid her crocheting aside. It was almost as if a prearranged signal existed between them, something imperceptible. For some reason Frog felt a curious tension—he was holding his breath without knowing why. The Summers sat motionless, staring out across their property. Then the old man moved his hand slightly at his side and his wife, without looking, reached out to take it.
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