Frog thought of young lovers. He watched, as the Summers must have watched him in the stream only the other day. Fair’s fair, he thought—you watch and I watch.
On the porch, the old couple stood up. Still holding hands, they inclined toward each other, face to face, lip to lip, in a slow kiss. They stood, body pressed against body, for what seemed to Frog like a very long time. He suddenly felt awkward, intruding on an intimacy like this. He shut his eyes a moment. When he looked again he saw the Summers were going inside the house, still holding hands as if they were desperately afraid to let go of each other.
They moved with the kind of urgency that could only have been a prelude to sex and yet they didn’t seem to be moving at any great speed, as far as Frog could tell. It was simply an impression he got—the old folks were going indoors to make love. He saw the Summers go into the house, watched the door close, noticed how the porch vibrated slightly from all the movement. And then there was silence through the clearing.
A little unsteadily, he rose to his feet. They make love, he thought. At their age. But why did that surprise him? What else was there to do out here anyway? Good luck to them. Bon appetit.
He turned away from the clearing and was about to move slowly down through the trees when a sound from the porch made him look back. He saw the woman hurry out of the house, the man appearing seconds later. They stood together on the porch and it was clear to Frog—from the man’s imploring gestures and the way the woman’s face was averted—that their little skirmish with passion had turned out badly. Although he could hear nothing that was said, Frog thought he saw the picture. The old guy couldn’t cut it anymore. It was as simple as that. He watched them embrace, but it was different from before—it had been defused, their passion derailed, it was nothing more than an embrace of comfort, a moment of consolation. Two old folks who couldn’t get it on anymore.
Frog could almost feel the old guy’s disappointment and humiliation. As he moved away, his legs hurting and a headache beginning to pound at the back of his skull, he realized that their faces were turned toward him now. They could see him, he was sure of that. What did they think of him—some forest voyeur, a creep of the dark green places?
Maybe they figured he was spying on them. Which, he thought, was true enough. A touch embarrassed, he dragged himself back through the trees and along the edge of the dry wash, unable to shake a vague depression that had fallen over him.
In the early morning light the woman climbed the steep path that led through St. Mary’s Cemetery. A sullen sunlight slanted through trees, illuminating the headstones with a kind of gloomy certainty. The woman walked slowly, with her head down and her body bent forward a little from the hips, as if she were struggling against a wind.
Florence Hann was fifty-eight years old and her thin face had an element of unshakable sorrow. It was not the kind of face you could imagine breaking into uncontrollable laughter. The eyes were like rusted mirrors that kept light locked in; the lips were tight and dry and mirthless. She wore a heavy gray coat, which, despite the clinging warmth of the early sun, was buttoned to her throat.
When she reached the summit of the path she paused and looked back down at the town of Carnarvon spread beneath her. A faint smoke-blue haze hung around the rooftops. Beyond, the woods created a thick green band around the town.
Florence Hann could see traces of moisture clinging to the faces of headstones. All the rows of the silent dead, she thought. So many of them. So many.
She walked a little way, glancing at the graves. Sometimes, when she came up here on the anniversary of Bobby’s death, she imagined she could hear dead voices whispering. They were unintelligible, barely audible, but they seemed to rise out of the earth as if from some dark chorus far below.
And sometimes she thought she heard Bobby’s voice among them. No words. No sentences. Just a certain tone, a suggestion of the boy’s voice that created little tremors in her heart.
She sniffed the flowers she carried. Six dark red roses, one for each year of the child’s life. One for each suffering, wasting year.
She paused at a place where the pathway forked. Each year it seemed to her more and more difficult to recall the child’s face, more and more difficult to bring to mind the color of his eyes or the way his hair looked or how he felt when she touched him. It was bitterly unfair. She had been robbed of the boy once when he had died; now she was being robbed again, this time by the deterioration of her own memory.
She continued to walk, slowing as she always did in the vicinity of his grave. It was a modest headstone but it was all she had been able to afford because her husband, Frank, had deserted them shortly after the boy started to get sick. She couldn’t bring herself to blame Frank any longer. She was too tired of apportioning blame. These things just happened. That was all.
No. They didn’t just happen. Nothing ever just happened. Something made them happen.
Her shadow fell across the stone. The words were simple.
ROBERT “BOBBY” HANN
1949–1955
Before His Time
Dear God, the woman thought. So well before his time.
Her eyes watered. She raised her face upward to the sunlight. Six brief years. Six blood-red flowers.
She went down on her knees in the grass and laid the flowers against the stone. She closed her eyes and she thought of how she knew of at least one other grave in St. Mary’s Cemetery exactly like Bobby’s. At least one other.
A shadow fell across her, obscuring the words on the headstone. She turned her face. The man who stood behind her with the sun throwing his face into shadow was tall and wide-shouldered and he stood with his head tilted questioningly to one side. For a moment she didn’t recognize him, but then he moved his face and the sunlight filled in his features.
“What brings you up here?” she asked.
Miles Henderson shrugged. He had a big white face and a small mouth and his smile was like a tiny hole punched in the center of an unbaked cookie. “I was walking, that’s all.”
“You walk up here often?” Florence asked. She raised a hand to the collar of her coat. She had a suspicion that Henderson had been drinking, but she didn’t say anything. Although she hadn’t seen the retired physician for several years, she’d heard the rumors about his colossal drinking activities—binges that were said to last two, maybe three, days. It was a wonder he wasn’t a dead man.
“Now and then, Florence.” Miles Henderson set his feet apart and balanced his overweight body as best he coud. “Anniversary,” and he nodded his head at the grave.
“You might say.” The woman stood up, her arms hanging at her sides.
“It’s been a long time,” Henderson remarked. “Thirty-one years, Florence.”
“Like you say, a long time.” She looked at Henderson’s face. The eyes were bloodshot and the tip of the squat nose was lined with broken red veins.
“And you’re no farther along, are you, Doctor?”
She hadn’t meant to say that, but it had come out of her mouth before she could stop it and now she felt a vague resentment directed not only at the death of the boy and the physician but also at herself, as if she had failed dismally in ways she couldn’t quite comprehend.
“There’s still no cure,” Henderson said quietly. “Researchers are working on it all over the world. But …” He shrugged and swayed a little on his spread legs. He took his hands out of his big overcoat and rubbed them together. Big red hands that hadn’t been able to save this small boy’s life.
“A cure wouldn’t be much good to Bobby now,” Florence Hann said. She gazed away from Henderson down the side of Cemetery Hill toward the town. Smoke drifted out of the forest, miles away.
Henderson said, “I retired, Florence.”
“I heard that.”
“Out to pasture. Just like some old horse.” He sighed; his shoulders slumped.
The woman gazed at the grave again.
“I don’t miss it,” Henderson
said. “Let some young guy cure the sick. Somebody with a commitment to it. Let somebody else perform autopsies. You get to a point where you start to see life only in terms of death and you don’t know what the hell the point of anything might be.” He was silent for a moment. “Whatever happened to pure old joy?”
“You’re asking me?” She glanced at him.
Henderson ran one of his large hands across his mouth. “I couldn’t do a damn thing about your boy. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know it.”
He flapped his arms and his overcoat made a rustling sound. “I couldn’t give him life, Florence. Nobody could have done that.”
The woman looked down at the headstone again. And then, raising her face, returned her eyes to the distant pall of smoke that came rising out of the forest. “You knew I’d be here today, didn’t you? Maybe you’ve got something you want to say to me, Doctor. Is that it?”
Henderson shook his head with uncertainty. “I wasn’t sure …” A look of pained confusion crossed his face. “I’m not sure of much these days. Something went out of me the day I retired. I forget things. I get confused. I don’t remember details. Why am I up here? I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“You’ve been drinking, Doctor.”
“A little.”
“It’ll kill you.”
“Something’s got to.”
Florence Hann sighed. “How many are buried up here?” she asked. “Like Bobby. How many like Bobby, Doctor?”
Henderson moved almost imperceptibly away from her. “I don’t follow you, Florence. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you?” She stared at him. Then she was looking back down at the town below her. She saw sluggish tourist traffic move along the main street, the big buses that would disgorge retired couples and Japanese tourists drawn to Carnarvon by its quaintness, its turn-of-the-century atmosphere, its authenticity. All they ever encountered was the surface of this town, its appearance; they didn’t penetrate the substance of the place. How could they?
Miles Henderson stepped toward her and placed one hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it aside.
“Bobby died. And you’re upset. And I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything. But I just don’t follow what you mean, Florence.”
The woman felt cold suddently. “Maybe some places are cursed, Doctor. Maybe it’s that.”
“You’re talking nonsense, Florence. Places aren’t cursed. Sometimes people have more than their share of misfortune, but it doesn’t mean that a geographical location is bad in itself.” The physician laughed quietly, but it was a mirthless sound.
The woman turned away from her child’s grave. “I know what I’ve seen,” she said icily.
She walked several yards quickly, then paused, turning back to look at the physician. Then she walked away.
15
When he was sure Louise and Dennis had gone, when he was certain they were out of sight between the trees and well on their way to visit the Summers, Max took a couple of Darvon and washed them down with a glass of scotch. There had been bad dreams and he’d awakened with a feeling of impending disaster. And when Dennis had come up with the suggestion of going to see Dick and Charlotte—quaint neighbors, Max thought—he’d declined, saying he thought he was coming down with a cold.
He listened to the voices of his wife and son until they faded among the pines, and then he went inside the living room, where he sat down on the sofa, balancing his scotch between the palms of his hands. The dreams, he thought—were they the artifacts of his guilt?
He couldn’t remember them now with any certainty, but something had been circling the house, this redwood house, time and again in the dark of night. Something that appeared to shuffle, a creature he couldn’t identify.
Around dawn he’d gone out onto the sun deck and scanned the trees, scrutinized those blind places where light hadn’t fallen. He had remained on the deck for thirty minutes, gazing out at the landscape like a man who expects to see something move. Once he noticed an empty reverberating branch that might have been set in motion by a departed bird. He had had the feeling of standing in a place where dream and reality collided in such a way the edges were blurred, the distinctions gone. Had he dreamed the creature circling the house? Or was the act of standing on the sun deck the dream and the creature the reality?
Max rubbed his eyes and looked at the telephone. The Darvon created a kind of glaze between himself and the things he perceived. He felt as if he were sitting inside a clear plastic box. It wasn’t unpleasant. He rose and wandered to the window. Then he turned back to the telephone again. What was he supposed to do? Call Connie just to tell her not to call him here?
He picked up the receiver and punched out the number. It rang for such a long time that he began to wonder if she were home. The notion that she might be out somewhere, perhaps even with another man, touched him with a jealousy, which took him by surprise. Jealousy, Max? What does that imply?
He replaced the receiver, ran the cuff of his shirt over his warm forehead, then picked up the phone again. He dialed the number a second time. Connie answered almost at once.
“Was that you before?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Max said.
“I was in the shower.” Silence. “I had a feeling it was you. I’m glad you called.”
The shower, he thought. Had she been alone there? He was filled with a great longing for the woman, a desire to see her, hold her, take her to bed.
“How is the bucolic life?” she asked.
“Quiet,” Max replied. Why had he called, for God’s sake? He hadn’t come all the way up to this forlorn place just to drag the past with him like this. He had come for a different reason. He was here to reestablish his love for his wife and son, which is what he should have been working on. Instead he was digging up something he wanted to bury.
“Can you stand it?”
“I think so.”
She was quiet for a while. “I drove past the hotel the other day. You know, the one overlooking the Bay. It’s silly, but I wanted to go in and take a room. I wanted to sit at the window and look at the view.”
Max shut his eyes. He had to put a stop to this nonsense, he had to tell Connie once and for all that they were finished, through, it was over.
“I think about you, Max. Do you think about me?”
His voice dry, he confessed that he did.
“Can’t you come to the city? Can’t you find some excuse to come see me?”
“I don’t know how I could do that, Connie.”
“You’re good at making up stories, Max. Why don’t you think of something? I miss you.”
Max gazed at the window, where a bleak sunlight fell. He said, “I don’t feel very inspired, Connie.”
“What’s the matter with your voice? It sounds thick. Are you ill?”
“I’m fine.”
“Will you come see me?”
“I don’t see how I can—”
“Find a way, Max.”
Max tried to think of something to say. The silence on the line was a great void into which he felt his life was spilling. But nothing came to him.
“I want you, Max,” the girl said. “And I know what you want. I know what Max likes, don’t I? I know how to satisfy you, Max.”
She had lowered her voice until it was a sultry whisper. Max felt the beginning of an erection. It was preposterous—he was going through some retarded adolescence, something he’d missed on the first go-around because he’d been too busy working toward his goal—the Physician, the Healer. He’d never wanted to be anything else since the age of seven, when a kindly old GP called McNamara had given him a shot of penicillin to fight an infection Max had developed in his ear. McNamara had leaned toward the frightened seven-year-old boy and whispered, “I’ve got a magic needle, Maxie. And this magic needle is going to cure you.”
A magic needle. It had all started there. Max wanted to be like McNamara. He wanted his own magic needle. And here he was, thirty-two
years later, making a goddamn mess of everything. It was a slide he had to stop, a breach he had to shore up somehow.
“If you won’t come down here, Max …” The voice turned.
“What, Connie? You’ll do what?”
A pause. Max fidgeted with the phone cord. “Connie …”
But she had hung up abruptly. Max put the receiver down.
Had she threatened him just then? He wasn’t sure. He went into the kitchen and took a cold beer from the refrigerator, popping the tab quickly and swallowing the chilly liquid down into his dry throat.
I love my wife, he said to himself. I love my wife, my son. My family.
He crumpled the aluminum can in his hand.
Miles Henderson understood that it had been a mistake of judgment to go up on Cemetery Hill, today of all days. Now, as he walked down Delaney Street, limping past the tourist buses and the out-of-state campers, he needed a drink.
He crossed Delaney. A warm gust of wind caught the hem of his overcoat and flapped it against his thigh. His legs ached, which meant his circulation was all screwed up again. By the time he reached Bascolini’s his legs were barely functional. He limped inside and ordered a double gin and tonic and carried it to a table at the back of the room, where the shadows were deep and cool.
I delivered Bobby Hann, he thought. I brought that baby into this world. And he’d been a good healthy baby. Strong and loud and hungry. It was only later that the sickness came.
He sipped his drink. I also did the autopsy on the body, which he didn’t need to remember now because he had set aside the knives and instruments of his dead craft. He took a cigar from its aluminum tube and lit it with a flourish of his hand. Sweet Christ, why was he trembling? The exertion from walking? Or something else?
The encounter with Florence Hann.
But that was your own fault, Doc, for going up there in the first place. You knew you’d see the woman—did you want to be reminded of something? Was that it?
“Crap,” he said to himself. He looked into the bottom of his empty glass. He rose clumsily and went back to the bar for a refill. When he had it, and the slight alcoholic panic activated by the empty glass had passed away, he returned to his table. He was cold suddenly, shivering inside the folds of his coat. The inner thermostat was breaking down with age; all the clocks that regulated you were in need of winding except you couldn’t find the right keys for them. Time was always a precise killer, always punctual.
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