The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  Dennis nodded. It was the kind of music he could easily tune out. It was a little bland for him.

  “I don’t have heavy metal or anything,” Frog said. “I’m not sure I should apologize for that omission, though.”

  “That’s okay.” The boy shrugged.

  “What happened to you? You fall into a cesspool or something?” Frog asked, stroking his beard.

  “I was working on Dick Summer’s pickup.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We got the engine to start.”

  “Good going,” Frog said.

  “It’s a 1941 truck.”

  “A classic.”

  “I guess.”

  Frog stirred the food. It glistened inside the skillet. “You get along real well with the Summers, don’t you?”

  Dennis heard the song change. Now the guy was singing something about an elevator breaking down in the Brain Hotel. Weird stuff. “They’re lonely, I guess,” he said. “I figure they like having somebody young around. Maybe they wanted kids at some time only they couldn’t have them. I don’t know.”

  Frog turned off the Coleman stove. “Want to share this with me?”

  Dennis nodded eagerly.

  Frog dished out two portions and Dennis ate quickly.

  “You don’t know about chewing, Denny? You never learned that knack?”

  The boy smiled. “I don’t know why I’m so hungry all the time.”

  Frog chewed every mouthful carefully. “You’re a growing boy. That’s my guess.”

  “I didn’t have much of an appetite back in the city.”

  Frog finished and lay flat on his back, gazing up at the sky. Dennis spooned the last few morsels out of the skillet and onto his plate. “This is so good,” he said. He was still hungry when he’d finished the last of the food. “What do you call this stuff?”

  Frog said it was Mongolian beef. He yawned. “What do they talk about?”

  “Who?” Dennis asked.

  “The old folks. What do they talk about?”

  Dennis shrugged. “Stuff.”

  “That’s informative.”

  “Well, it’s hard to say, Frog. I mean, I don’t know what they talk about when I’m not around.”

  Frog lowered his head again. “Good point,” he mumbled.

  Dennis added, “They speak about the past sometimes.”

  “I figured they might.” Frog propped himself up on one elbow. The early evening sun laid a film of orange over his face and burned in the silvery hairs of his beard. “When you get to their age, what else have you got?”

  “I guess,” the boy remarked.

  Frog stared at Dennis a moment. “Hey, maybe you could put in a good word for me with them. Tell them I’m a terrific weeder, a hard worker. Tell them that when it comes to shaping a place up I’m Mr. Amazing.”

  Dennis smiled. “Yeah. I’ll try.”

  “Don’t enthuse or anything,” Frog said, tugging at his little beard.

  Dennis was quiet for a time. He listened to the soft undercurrent of the stream, which was lost somewhat in the noise of the music.

  “I get the feeling, Frog, they don’t care much for company.”

  “You’re company.”

  Dennis shook his head. “It’s like they think of me as their grandchild or something. That’s different. I don’t know exactly how to explain it.”

  Frog found a twig and worked it between his fingers. He gazed up at the sky, then he said, “Don’t think I don’t like your company, my man, because I do—but does your mother know you’re up here with me?”

  “I guess not.”

  Frog slapped his thigh. “I’ll walk part of the way back with you then. I need the exercise.”

  Dennis rose reluctantly. “Isn’t jogging enough for you?”

  Frog put his arm around the kid’s shoulder. “When you’re an excessive personality like me, you can’t get enough of anything. Including pain and humiliation.”

  They walked a little way in silence. Between the trees there was already the suggestion of night falling, murky pools of shadow developing. Dennis was glad of Frog’s company—when the sun disappeared the forest changed. A weird silence fell over it, a dormancy broken only now and then by the sound of an animal or the dark cry of a bird. Sometimes, especially at night, Dennis would lie awake watching the pattern of branches imposed by moonlight upon the window of his room or listen to the footfall of some animal drawn by curiosity to sniff around the house—the forest had a night life all its own, and it was just a little spook-eee.

  “What brought you out here, Frog?” Dennis asked.

  Frog thought a moment. “Where else do you go when you’ve grown out of communes and you’re too old to get your hair cut and find a job as a postal clerk or something?” He laughed to himself quietly. “Can you see a guy called Frog holding down a position in a bank?”

  Dennis shook his head.

  “I didn’t really grow up,” Frog said. “I kinda grew sideways, if you see what I mean.”

  Dennis wasn’t sure what he meant but he nodded anyhow. Between the trees he could see the outline of the redwood house. The sun deck jutted out into branches of a pine.

  “You going to come in with me?” he asked.

  “I’ll pass this time,” Frog answered. “Next time you’re hungry, stop over.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Or next time you feel like some company that isn’t entirely ancient, see me. At least I’m only middle-aged.”

  Entirely ancient, Dennis thought. Was Frog criticizing the Summers in some way? Or was he implying, obliquely, that Dennis shouldn’t hang around old people all the time? The boy wasn’t sure. Maybe Frog hadn’t meant anything.

  Dennis moved quickly in the direction of the house, pausing once to look back. But Frog was already gone, swallowed by the darkening forest.

  22

  “Surprise surprise,” Martine said. She was standing, arms folded, behind the bar at the Ace of Spades. She looked tired, Metger thought, as he climbed onto a stool. Circles under the eyes, little lines at the corners of her lips—it was just after ten and she’d probably been tending bar for eight hours or so.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Metger said.

  Martine leaned against the bar, inclining her head toward him. “Does your wife know you’re out, Jerry?”

  Metger smiled. “I was careful not to wake her.” He had risen in the darkened bedroom and dressed silently in old jeans and sneakers and a windbreaker. He had left the house quietly, with no particular destination in mind. All he knew was that if he lay in bed any longer, tossing and turning and seeking the dark reaches of sleep, he’d go crazy. He couldn’t relax, couldn’t switch off the old electric light in his brain. And so he’d driven down through the night streets of Carnarvon, unable to shake loose his encounter with Florence Hann.

  Martine opened a bottle of beer and slid it toward him. She supplied a glass and watched him pour. “Problems?”

  Metger shook his head. Problems, he thought. Some things you couldn’t define quite that simply.

  Somebody in one of the booths at the back of the room went to the jukebox and punched in coins. Two half-drunk cowboys played a casual game of pool over in the corner. There was the sound of balls clicking.

  “Did you ever go to that house?” Martine asked.

  “I made a courtesy call. Nice couple. I didn’t get to meet the kid, though.”

  Martine moved a strand of hair away from her forehead. She lit a cigarette, which she placed in an ashtray. The smoke rose toward Metger’s eyes. He shifted his head slightly as he sipped the cold beer, which left a metallic taste at the back of his mouth. Now the jukebox kicked into life. It was one of those whining country tunes Metger disliked. “I Fall to Pieces …”

  He said, “I ran into Florence Hann today.”

  “Who?”

  “Florence Hann. You remember her.”

  Martine looked puzzled a moment, then she said, “I don’t see her face. I r
emember her kid, though. What was his name?”

  “Bobby,” Metger said.

  “He had that sickness.”

  “Right. He came to school for maybe a week … A month … I don’t rightly remember. Then he vanished.”

  “Shame about that kid,” Martine said. “He died, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Metger tapped his fingertips on the bar. He went down inside the shadowy places of his own memory for a moment, reaching for a recollection of Bobby Hann’s face. When he had it the image was surrounded by clutter—spilled water-color paints, chalk dust, Miss Gabriel’s shrill voice, the sight of Florence Hann waiting in the school yard every day for Bobby to get out. And then they’d both disappear inside a car and go home and the car was spitting out great black clouds of smoke. Metger recalled wondering why they rushed away like that each day, why Forence Hann didn’t allow Bobby to linger in the yard like everyone else. Now he understood, as he hadn’t at the time, that it was because Florence Hann couldn’t stand the idea of her son undergoing the torture of other kids laughing at him.

  Normal kids.

  Then one day Bobby Hann didn’t come to school and nobody ever saw him again. It created a mystery in Metger’s young mind.

  “Do you remember you used to wear a blue ribbon in your hair back then?” he asked.

  “Red,” Martine said. “It was a red ribbon.”

  “You’re confused, Martine. Blue. I used to pull it.”

  “Red, red, Jerry. I ought to know. Even then I was conscious of what colors suited me. I never wore blue.”

  Blue, red—what difference did it make now? Metger wondered.

  “So why all this nostalgia, Sheriff?”

  “I guess it was because I ran into Florence, that’s all.” But that wasn’t all. There was more. Only he couldn’t quite get a handle on what the rest of it was—he understood simply that it bugged him, that he couldn’t leave it alone. It was the same feeling you got when you had a word on the tip of your tongue only you couldn’t say it because there was some bewildering short circuit in the coils of memory, something that wouldn’t quite connect for you.

  He finished his drink. Martine opened a second bottle for him. He studied the label for a time. Sometimes these days his mind seemed to him like a coat that didn’t quite fit. It was too tight and it made him uncomfortable and he wanted to throw it off.

  He said, “I felt the baby kick yesterday.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Strange sensation. I put my hand on Nora’s stomach and the kid launched a terrific kick.” He realized he had a stupid paternal grin on his face all at once.

  “How did you feel?”

  “I can’t explain,” he answered. “Proud. Scared shitless. Awed. Afraid. All of the above.”

  Martine smiled and patted the back of his hand. “Afraid of what?”

  “Who knows?” He sipped his beer, glanced at the pool players, tuned out the jukebox and the sound of Patsy Cline’s voice. “It’s probably a common experience for expectant fathers.”

  “You’ll make a wonderful father, Jerry,” Martine said. “You’ll be kind and attentive and indulgent.”

  “I don’t know about indulgent,” he said. Scared, he thought. Scared of the impending birth. There were times when he lay in the darkness of the bedroom with his arm circled around his wife’s big belly and he’d try to imagine the kid floating inside the amniotic sac and he felt queasy, uncertain, hoping the child was all right in that blind moist place but not really knowing for certain.

  Martine was silent a moment. She reached out and touched the surface of Metger’s beer bottle. “You were kind and attentive and indulgent when it came to me, Jerry. Once upon a time.”

  “Once upon a time,” he said. He smiled awkwardly. He finished his beer and spread his hands on the bar. Martine picked her cigarette out of the ashtray and drew on it before setting it down once again.

  Metger drifted back to Florence Hann once more. Moths and flames, singed wings. You should leave it all alone.

  What came to his mind was the strange question she’d come out with, the way she’d looked when she’d asked it: Who killed the children? Wasn’t that the question? Who killed the children?

  What children?

  Who was she talking about? Her own son, obviously—but why did she couch her question in the plural? She couldn’t have known about Anthea Ackerley. How could she? Maybe she was referring to the boy Metger’s father had once talked about. Bewilderment, spirals of confusion—Metger felt he was on some watery downhill slope with no hope of ever stopping. His mind seemed to him now like a series of highways that weren’t connected to one another, freeways along which his thoughts hurtled without purpose, without direction. Anthea Ackerley dies. Bobby Hann dies. A baby is about to be born. New tenants move into a house of tragedy.

  There are no links, he thought.

  Goddamnit, there are no connections.

  You, Metger, are a troublesome fool.

  He pushed himself away from the bar now, turning his face toward the door.

  “You have to leave?” Martine asked.

  He nodded.

  “I’m always here,” she said.

  He turned from the bar, then he paused and looked back at the woman. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did you ever hear of anybody else being sick like Bobby Hann?”

  She seemed disappointed. He realized she had expected a different kind of question, something more personal. Maybe we can get together sometime, Martine, go out for a drink, old time’s sake, what do you say?

  “Like Bobby?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Never. Did you?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know for sure.” He thought. “Something my father told me once. Or might have told me. Or else I dreamed it.”

  He smiled at her and stepped outside into the dark and he stood for a while in the glow of the neon sign that filled the night. Across the parking lot, in a place where the neon couldn’t reach, the forest began. It lay there, crouched and black and silent, like a creature of infinite patience observing the ways of the night. Metger thought of the people from San Francisco who lived down there across the darkness. He thought of their redwood house with perhaps a couple of feeble lights from windows trying to make tiny holes in the night. He thought of the other residents of the forest. That old couple, the Summers. The dropout who lived in a van.

  He stared upward. The moon came sailing out of clouds and laid silver snowlike tracks across the landscape. These threads of light did nothing to dispel the feeling he had right then—which was fear, indescribably complex.

  23

  Louise said, “It stinks your whole room up, Denny. I don’t know how you can stand it, frankly. Doesn’t it bother you?”

  Dennis was propped up in bed, watching his mother. He was leafing through the pages of an adventure story. Louise glimpsed the title: The Lost Moons of Earth.

  She turned her attention to the bedside table, where the gleaming brown bait lay inside the glass jar and looked for all the world like a huge amorphous slug. Dennis had removed the stopper and now the putrid aroma drifted around her nostrils.

  “I find it offensive,” she added.

  “The air makes the bait mature. Dick said so.”

  “Did Dick also tell you that it was likely to sicken your mother?”

  Dennis smiled. He reached out and put the stopper back. “There,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Louise said.

  Boys, she thought. Why do boys love disgusting things? Once Dennis had dragged home a maggoty cat, long-dead and stiff, insisting it have a decent burial in the backyard. Why couldn’t she have had a daughter, dammit? Someone with just a little more grace, a little more sensitivity. She sat down on the edge of the boy’s bed. The scent was still strong, repellent. She tried unsuccessfully to ignore it.

  “You really think fish will like that stuff?”

  Dennis nodded
. “They love it.”

  “According to Dick.”

  “Right.”

  “I thought fish would have better taste,” she said.

  Dennis flipped the pages of his book. Despite the fact he’d taken a bath—which Louise had forced him into—there was still black grease beneath his fingernails. My boy, the mechanic. She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. Propped up against the bedside lamp, adjacent to the bait, was the photograph the Summers had given the boy. Louise picked it up and held it flat into the light. Although she’d tried before, she could barely see any resemblance between the old people and this young couple captured in the picture. She wondered idly when it might have been taken. Charlotte wore a white gown into which flowers had been stitched—white floral details on the white background. She flipped it over, looked at the inscription on the back—a photographer’s name and address—and then she set it down. Why did she think it a curious thing to give a twelve-year-old-boy? It was a keepsake, a memento, nothing more.

  “I only came in to say good night.”

  Dennis put his book down. “Good night, Mom.”

  “Got any plans for tomorrow?” she asked when she reached the doorway.

  “I guess we’ll work on the pickup again.”

  “Ah.” She stepped out into the corridor, closing the door of the boy’s room quietly. She paused briefly at the foot of the stairs. She could hear Max up in the bedroom, opening and shutting one of the closets. She needed air. The rancid scent of the Wonder Bait still filled her nostrils. She stepped out onto the front porch.

  There was a bright moon surrounded by ghosts of clouds. Unlike any city moon, which was usually ensnared in gasoline fumes and industrial smoke, this one seemed pristine, a cold transparent disk in the dark blue sky, clear and pockmarked and aloof. She leaned against the wall of the house, folding her arms. The night air had a sharp edge to it. She sucked it deeply into her lungs. Perfection, she thought. Almost … Dennis intended to visit the Summers again in the morning. Why did that bother her?

  The answer was easy. She and Max and the boy should have been planning something together. Why did he have to find pleasure in the company of two old people who were practically strangers to him? The thought irked her a little. Max had said he’d surprise Dennis—so far he hadn’t mentioned how he planned to do it.