The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  And then she found the source of the horror. It came from a small unstoppered glass jar on the bedside table. The jar contained something shapeless, dark brown.

  She knew what it was. Dick Summer’s Wonder Bait.

  19

  Outside the Alpha Beta, Florence Hann paused. The big windows had posters advertising various special bargains. Now and then, when the glass doors slid open, she could hear the voices of checkers over the intercom system. Price check on Number Six. Harry, please come up front. Harry. These voices seemed to emerge from an unknown dimension. They were disembodied and strange, somehow shrill to Florence Hann’s ears.

  She stared at the advertised specials. But she wasn’t really seeing them. Instead, her attention had been drawn to the sight of Jerry Metger, who was moving down the covered walkway toward her. She pretended she didn’t notice him. She gazed at an illustration of a cow, its body diagramed into various sections. Rump. Prime rib. Sirloin. She didn’t want to talk to Jerry Metger.

  But he was on her before she had a chance to hurry inside the market. The automatic doors slid open and she heard an amplified voice ask, Bobby, where are you? But she knew that had to be a mistake, something she hadn’t heard properly.

  “Nice afternoon, Florence,” Metger said.

  It didn’t seem right to her that somebody as young as this should be sheriff of Carnarvon. She had liked the old sheriff, Big Tom Altman, because he hadn’t seemed like a law officer at all, more like your next-door neighbor. And he’d been kind at the time of Bobby’s death. She’d always remember that.

  “How are you these days?” Metger asked. He put his hands on his hips. The butt of his pistol caught her eye and she felt a tiny, inward flinch. She looked into his eyes now.

  Why was she suddenly reminded of a recurring nightmare she had? It was a bad dream of a yellow school bus and Bobby’s face was staring out at her from every window. Behind each pane of glass, the same weary face. There was no expression on the faces other than resignation to a fate over which there was no control. They were all going to their end without question. All these blank, leathery faces. The big yellow vehicle was a bus of death.

  She could hear the door hiss shut. The roar of tires.

  She must have swayed, or lost control somehow, because Metger was holding her by the arm and asking if she was all right. She said she was fine. But the bus was still lodged in her mind and all the faces behind glass wouldn’t go away. She concentrated on Metger’s eyes now.

  “You sure you’re okay, Florence?”

  “Perfectly fine, Jerry.”

  “You had me worried there. I thought you were going to fall over.”

  “That would look good, wouldn’t it? Falling over outside Alpha Beta. People would think I was drunk.” She forced a little laugh into her voice, but she knew it didn’t sound convincing.

  Jerry Metger was staring at her strangely. She turned her face to the side. “I’d get a reputation like Miles Henderson, wouldn’t I?”

  Metger smiled. “You’d need to work pretty hard to get that,” he said.

  “So what are you doing, Sheriff? Grocery shopping or something?” Her voice seemed reedy to her, like wind in a wooden cylinder. “Or are you out catching real criminals?”

  “Who are the real criminals, Florence?” Metger was still smiling but it had changed somehow—it had become a stiff expression in the middle of his face.

  “Don’t you know the answer yourself, Sheriff?”

  Metger said, “No. You tell me.”

  She looked through the window of the supermarket and saw a fat woman dragging a sobbing child by his hand. A perfectly normal sobbing boy. There was a tight fluttering around her heart.

  Metger said, “I’ll tell you what I think, Florence. I think there aren’t any real criminals in Carnarvon.”

  “No?” She waited a second, almost purposefully, before she looked at him with a bitter smile. “Who killed the children, Sheriff? You got an answer for that one?”

  Florence Hann moved toward the door of the supermarket. She tripped the automatic device and the door slid open noiselessly. A stream of cold air rushed out at her. She was conscious of Sheriff Metger looking at her and she imagined he was going to pursue her right inside the store, but all he did was stand on the sidewalk and shake his head from side to side. As if he pitied her. As if he thought her mad.

  She remember something—if Bobby Hann had lived, he would be exactly the same age now as Jerry Metger. And another thing: for a short time, a week or two, until it had become too unbearable for the boy to go to public school, until the pain and the humiliation had become more than he could justifiably take, he had been in the same first-grade class as the sheriff.

  If Bobby Hann had lived …

  The glass door slipped shut behind her and she turned once, but Metger had already gone somewhere across the sunny parking lot.

  Dennis nibbled his way around the edges of a chocolate-chip cookie. It was really the only way to eat them—begin on the outside and munch your way into the dead center. Charlotte had put a whole plate of the cookies in front of him. He ate three, then pushed the rest aside, feeling just a little bloated. Dick and Charlotte liked to feed him, to spoil him. They watched him as he ate, apparently enjoying the sight of his pleasure.

  “Had enough?” Charlotte asked.

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Always eat enough to keep your strength up. It’s very important. ’Specially at your age.”

  Dick, who sometimes echoed his wife, nodded. “Very important.”

  Charlotte asked, “You eat that fudge I brought over?”

  Dennis said he had. He belched quietly into the palm of his hand. Then he looked at Dick, who was cleaning some silverware. The old man dipped each knife into a dark liquid solution, turned the blade around a couple of times, then dried the knife off. Today was the day Dick had promised they’d begin work on the pickup, but so far he hadn’t raised the subject. At times the Summers seemed to forget things, but that was part of growing old anyhow, Dennis thought. Your memory wandered. He suppressed another belch. The cookies were delicious, like everything else Charlotte baked. But why did they fill him up so much?

  He drummed his fingers on the table. “How long have you been married?” he asked.

  The Summers chuckled together, as if this question amused them mildly. “More years than I care to remember,” Charlotte said.

  “Did you have a honeymoon? Where did you go?”

  “This boy asks a whole bunch of questions, doesn’t he, Dick?”

  “He surely does,” Dick said.

  “Dad says it’s the only way you ever get any answers.”

  “Your dad’s right,” Charlotte said. She looked thoughtful a moment. “We’ve had a few honeymoons, Denny. We’ve had a few. Most folks have only one in a whole lifetime. But that wasn’t the way for Dick and me.” A kind of glaze went across the old woman’s face as she remembered something. “We went different places. Niagara Falls. One time we went to Vancouver up in Canada. Another time Dick took me down to Mexico. We went a whole lot of places.”

  “Why did you have so many honeymoons?”

  “Love, child. Love,” Charlotte replied. “We’ve always believed you fall in love with each other more than just once in a lifetime. It’s a process that goes on and on. Doesn’t stop just because you’re old.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes for a time. Dick gazed down at the floor, lost in his thoughts. A shaft of sun pierced through the open door of the house and illuminated their old faces and Dennis thought of a bright flashlight falling on crumpled white paper. It was hard for him to imagine two people as old as the Summers being in love; he always associated love with youth. Now he glanced at Charlotte’s hands. He was fascinated by how they appeared, gnarled and misshapen and raw. He wondered if the Summers ever made love together; he couldn’t see Charlotte’s ungainly hands caressing Dick. It was a picture he couldn’t quite make.

  Charlotte stepp
ed away. “I’ll show you something. Promise you won’t laugh?”

  “I promise,” the boy said.

  He watched her go to the stairs, where she climbed up into the gloom. Her bones creaked as she went. Dick was still dipping silverware inside the cleaning solution. Knives shone. In the glittering blades Dennis could see his own reflection thrown back twenty times.

  “Sometimes,” Dick said. “Sometimes the past’s the only thing you got to look forward to.”

  Dennis smiled as if he understood this, but he didn’t.

  “You’ll see for yourself one day,” Dick added.

  Dennis was quiet a moment. If Dick wasn’t going to bring up the subject of the truck, he’d have to do it himself. He cleared his throat. “Yesterday you said we could get under the hood of the Dodge. You remember that?”

  “Sure I do. Soon as I finish this silverware, we’ll go out there.” Dick smiled. “You remember to do what I told you about that bait?”

  “I kept the lid off the jar, just like you said.”

  “Good. Thing is, if you expose the bait to the air, it matures that much quicker.”

  “It stinks, though.”

  “Doesn’t stink to a fish,” Dick said and winked. “Which is what really matters.”

  There was silence now. Dennis closed his eyes. He found this house serene in some way. He could relax here because the Summers didn’t bother him about anything. There was no pick up after yourself, Denny, or put the cap back on the toothpaste or you’ve spilled paint all over the floor! There was none of that parental stuff. Nor was there a moody father to contend with.

  He opened his eyes. Dick was watching him.

  Dennis turned to look at a shelf of old clocks, their glass cases so covered in dust that the hands and faces couldn’t be seen. He tried to imagine what the room would sound like if all these clocks began ticking at once. The Summers had so much old stuff here it was like a museum nobody attended to. There was a liberating quality for Dennis in all the dust and the cobwebs and the junk outside—a wonderful sense of disorder, of chaos. Back home, Louise rarely allowed chaos into their lives, which Dennis thought a pity.

  Charlotte was coming slowly back down the stairs, smiling to herself. In one hand she clutched a photograph. There was an expression on her face that Denny thought was secretive, as if she were enjoying herself immensely.

  “See,” she said, placing the picture down on the table.

  “That old thing,” Dick said. “Haven’t looked at that in years.”

  Dennis gazed at the photograph. It depicted a man and woman, both around the age of twenty, standing on a quay with a steamship in the background. After careful scrutiny, Dennis could vaguely recognize Charlotte and Dick—but it wasn’t easy. How could these two young handsome people have grown so old?

  “Honeymoon,” Dick said.

  “Yep,” Charlotte remarked. “San Francisco.”

  “When was this taken?” Dennis asked. The photograph was sepia, the surface faintly cracked.

  “Before you were born,” Dick said.

  “Long before,” and Charlotte laughed.

  “Can’t remember the year,” Dick added.

  Dennis, who stared at the picture for what he thought was a politely long time, smiled at the Summers. “You look so different in this,” he said finally.

  “The boy says we look different, Dick.”

  “Boy’s right,” Dick said.

  The Summers laughed together for a moment.

  Then Dick remarked, “Charlotte, the boy doesn’t want to see old pictures of us! He wants to get working on that truck! That’s what this boy wants. Am I right?”

  Dennis nodded. “I’d like that.”

  Charlotte approached the table. She placed the palm of her hand on Dennis’s shoulder; there was a smell of lavender water. “A young man in a hurry,” she said. “You won’t always be in such a hurry, mister.”

  “I guess,” Dennis said, a little puzzled. As far as he knew, he wasn’t in much of a hurry about anything.

  “You keep that picture, Dennis,” Charlotte said. “Keep it as a memento.”

  “Thanks,” Dennis said uncertainly.

  “When you’re back in San Francisco maybe you’ll think of us sometimes.”

  Dick slapped the palm of one hand upon the table. “Roll up your sleeves, sonny! Let’s get that Dodge rolling!”

  Dennis followed the old man outside into the sunlight. Charlotte came out on the porch and watched them. She sat on a deck chair crocheting with stiff fingers, looking up every now and then to observe her husband and the boy putter around under the upraised hood of the old truck.

  20

  Max had his feet propped up on the sun-deck table. He stared upward at the inscrutable blue of the sky. In the distance was a thin spiral of pale smoke rising from the location of the Summers’ house.

  “Charlotte must be baking again,” Louise said.

  Max nodded in a drowsy kind of way. “I tried her fudge,” he said. “I don’t know what she sticks in her cooking, but it tastes bitter to me. I couldn’t eat any of it.”

  “Denny seems to lap it up.”

  “Obviously.” Max turned his face in the direction of the smoke.

  “He’s over there again,” Louise said.

  “Well, if he’s enjoying himself, I don’t see any harm.”

  Louise was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Why don’t you take him fishing, Max? Maybe you could take the tent and camp out with him. I know he’d like that.”

  Max smiled. “Make a night of it?”

  “Sure. It would be fun. You haven’t camped out with him since he was seven, Max.”

  Max reached down and picked up a book that lay on the floor of the deck. He placed it in his lap and stared at the cover. “I’ve been remiss, haven’t I?”

  “A little,” Louise said. “Call it oversight.”

  “Oversight,” Max said, as if he weren’t convinced. He smiled—a little sadly, Louise thought.

  Max got up and walked to the edge of the deck. He gripped the rail between his hands, turning his face toward the forest. Louise watched him. At least he understands his shortcomings as far as Denny’s concerned, she thought. But what about his behavior yesterday? What about the inconsiderate way he made love to me? What about the drinking? Is he conscious of these things too?

  She went to him, pressing her face against his spine, clasping her arms around his chest. “It’s nice he likes to visit the Summers, but nothing’s a substitute for one’s own father, Max.”

  “You’re right. I’ll plan something. I’ll surprise him.”

  “That would be wonderful.” She paused a second. “I know something else that would be equally wonderful.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You and me. A romantic dinner in Carnarvon. A night out. Just the two of us.”

  “And we could get the Wrinkled Ones to baby-sit.”

  The Wrinkled Ones, Louise thought. “They did offer.”

  “Then how can we refuse? Why don’t you ask them next time you see them?”

  “I noticed a couple of interesting restaurants in town,” she said. “Let’s go to the most expensive one we can possibly find. We’ll get dressed up—”

  “To the nines,” Max said.

  “And we’ll buy champagne—”

  “Two bottles—”

  “And then we’ll come back her and fool around—”

  “That’s the part I like best,” he said.

  “Max,” she said.

  “Max what?”

  She shrugged. Be whole, Max. Don’t be a stranger to us. “Yesterday,” she heard herself say in a quiet voice. “You worried me, you know that? You had me really worried.”

  Max shut his eyes briefly. He said, “I was having this bad dream. I can’t remember what it was about. When you woke me I guess I was disoriented. You know how dreams can leave you feeling. I’m sorry about yesterday.” He looked at her and he was smiling and it was t
he first time she’d seen that particular expression in days. You can still do it to me, Max. After all these years, you still have that knack of overcoming my doubts, my fears. And you still turn me on. He was making it easy, far easier than she’d anticipated. The stranger she’d encountered yesterday was gone, replaced by the real Max, the Max she knew.

  She held his hand against her breasts. She began to move into the bedroom, pulling him gently.

  “You want to try again?” she asked. “Huh? You want to start all over again?”

  She drew him back on the bed, her body falling under his. She reached for his belt, working the buckle with her fingers. The kiss was warm, perfect, an enclosed little universe. There was no darkness here. There was no anxiety. There was only a comfortingly familiar passion. She felt his palms slide beneath her shirt and his warm breath against the side of her neck. Beyond his head she could see the smoke rising outside in a clear unwavering line, perfectly bisecting the disk of the sun. And from a great distance away she was conscious of the telephone ringing downstairs.

  “Let it ring,” Max whispered. “Let it ring.”

  “I have absolutely no intention of answering it,” she said. The last few words of her sentence were lost under the warm pressure of Max’s mouth.

  Professor Pyotr Zmia allowed the telephone to ring a dozen times before he hung up. A little disappointed, he sat very still for a time on the edge of the double bed in the Untermeyers’ bedroom. During the last few days he had learned a great deal about the Untermeyers. He’d discovered a batch of old love letters written by a young medical student to the girl he adored—flowery things that even Professor Zmia, who knew how the amorous heart could babble, found slightly embarrassing. He had not imagined the physician as a romantic. The letters had been concealed inside a trunk in the attic, together with assorted discarded objects—a tennis racket, something called a pogo stick (Americans were given to investing huge sums of money in absurd pastimes—a fact the professor had learned on previous trips), broken medical equipment, and very old shoes. Under the big double bed he’d found and opened a couple of suitcases, which contained Louise’s underwear (scanty things, the professor thought) and a variety of birth-control devices as well as copies of old income-tax returns, certificates of deposit, bank statements, and blank prescription pads.