The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  She moved to the edge of the porch steps. Maybe tomorrow he’d have a scheme worked out; let him sleep on it. She shut her eyes, breathed deeply, relaxed. The forest stirred faintly as a thin breeze whimpered through the trees, blowing smells of pine resin at her. Somewhere nearby there was a soft dropping sound—a pinecone tumbling through branches to the earth.

  Or was it something else? She opened her eyes.

  The woman appeared in the driveway. Just like that. Louise felt her heart jump. She peered through the dark, narrowing her eyes.

  “Charlotte?” she asked. “Is that you?”

  The old woman came toward the porch, where the faint light falling from the hallway illuminated her. She looked up at Louise, smiling. She wore a robe, loosely belted at her waist, and her face—whether from moonlight or some kind of makeup, Louise didn’t know—appeared flat and white, a blank oval adrift in the darkness.

  “Insomnia,” Charlotte said. “Can’t sleep some nights.”

  Louise recovered quickly from her surprise. “Can I get you a glass of warm milk? They say it helps if you can’t sleep.” The old woman shook her head and Louise thought of her wandering aimlessly through the dark trees. “Won’t you at least come in for a moment?”

  Charlotte gazed past Louise at the open door, the hallway beyond. “Nice house.”

  “We like it—”

  “We enjoy your son,” Charlotte said suddenly. “He brings something into our house. If you know what I mean. Hope you don’t think we’re stealing his affection or anything.”

  The thought hadn’t crossed Louise’s mind and she said so now. In fact, she told Charlotte she was happy that Dennis had made new friends, that he had found something to keep him busy. Even as she spoke she had the odd suspicion that Charlotte’s insomnia was a small lie—maybe the old woman had walked over here just to explain about Dennis, just to say that he was welcome in the Summers’ house as long as he wanted to visit. Stealing his affection, Louise thought. It struck her as a quaint turn of phrase, something an old person might use.

  “Well,” Charlotte said. “So long as you don’t mind about him coming over. Cheers Dick up too.” The old woman smiled. “And Dick really needs it. At our age …” She didn’t finish her sentence. Her voice trailed off. She took her hands, which had been deep inside the big pockets of her robe, and spread them out in front of her. Moonlight hacked odd shadows out of the ridges of her knuckles. Louise looked politely away.

  The old woman said, “Hope I didn’t disturb you just turning up like that. You must have thought I was a prowler or something.”

  “You didn’t disturb me at all. I just stepped out for some fresh air. That bait your husband gave my son—”

  “I know what you mean. It sure catches fish though. I’ll say that much. Smells like hell but it works.” Charlotte smiled. “Some nights I walk as far as the stream. Other nights I come this way. Depends.”

  On what? Louise wondered. “It’s turning cold,” she said.

  “Yep,” Charlotte said. “I’d best be getting back. Maybe this time I won’t toss and turn.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want anything?”

  “Sure. But thanks.” The old woman moved toward the trees. “Be seeing you.”

  Louise watched her go out of sight, then turned and went back inside the house. She shut the door and leaned against it a moment. There was a sudden sense of peace throughout the house—she could feel it—a certain security, as if the house were a closed fortress against the vicissitudes of the dark outside.

  She moved down the hallway. When she reached the foot of the stairs she glanced in the direction of the kitchen, where there was a soft glow from the stove light. A faint sound drew her to the kitchen doorway.

  Dennis sat at the kitchen table. There was a large bowl of grapes in front of him and, like some predatory little creature of the dark intent on devouring as much as it possibly could, he was popping grapes hurriedly into his mouth and swallowing them with haste.

  Louise said, “Caught you! At last the Great Grape Thief is unmasked!”

  Dennis looked up in surprise. “I was famished,” the boy said, looking a little guilty.

  Louise walked to the table and sat down facing her son. In the pale light from the stove the boy appeared a little haggard. She put one hand over the back of Denny’s hand. His skin was cold to the touch.

  “Are you feeling okay, honey?” she asked.

  Dennis nodded. “Why do you ask?”

  “You’re so cold.”

  “I don’t feel cold.” Dennis placed a grape on his tongue, then closed his mouth.

  “I guess you’re all right. At least your appetite isn’t suffering.” Louise stood up. “I love you, Denny.”

  “Love you too,” said the boy.

  “Don’t eat too much.”

  “I’m through,” and Dennis pushed the fruit bowl aside.

  Louise yawned. “Good night again.”

  “Good night, Mom.”

  Max listened.

  He heard his wife come up the stairs. He listened to the sound of her robe brushing against the wall as she ascended. The bedroom door opened and she stepped inside. He reached for his glass of scotch on the bedside table and sipped.

  “A nightcap?” Louise asked.

  “It settles the turmoils of the mind,” he answered flippantly. “You want one?”

  “I don’t think so, Max.” Louise sat on the edge of the bed. She ran her fingers through her hair, smiling at him. “Have you given any more thought to the camping expedition?”

  Max said he was contemplating it. He forced enthusiasm into his voice. He hated fishing and the prospect of a night under canvas was anathema to him. Insects and kerosene fumes and lukewarm beans. But he knew he had to do something to make everybody happy.

  Louise said, “We just had a visitor. I found Charlotte Summer out there.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “Couldn’t sleep, she said,” Louise shrugged. “Actually, it was kind of touching in a way. She wants us to know that she and Dick aren’t stealing our son’s affections away from us.”

  Max smiled. “What did you say?”

  “I told her she was worried over nothing.”

  Max drained his glass and looked up at the ceiling. Louise rose and went into the bathroom. A moment later she appeared again, holding a small prescription bottle. Max started—he’d left his goddamn pills lying beside the sink! He ran one hand across his face—the combination of pills and alcohol can lead, he knew, to a kind of careless amnesia.

  “What are these, Max?” Louise asked, with a concerned look.

  “What does it say on the bottle?”

  “One hundred milligram Darvon. It’s made out to somebody called Ronald Smythe. Who’s he?”

  Max got up and grabbed the small brown bottle. Ronald Smythe was one of the stupid pseudonyms he used on his odyssey from one unfamiliar pharmacy to another. He pretended to read the label. He said, “I guess they must have been in my belongings. Smythe’s a patient of mine. Maybe he was supposed to pick this up at my office or something. I can’t remember.”

  Louise came back to the bed.

  Max put the bottle on the bedside table. His hands were trembling. He felt wretched. When you start to cheat you trap yourself in layers of deceit. You live in a dread that even chemicals can’t take the edge off.

  He held his wife’s hand. “I’ll talk to Denny in the morning,” he said. His voice was cheerful. “We’ll plan something.”

  And then he heard it as he’d known he would.

  It was shrill and piercing and it seemed to fill the entire house. He got out of bed. Louise said, “Who’d be calling at this time of night?”

  “Don’t know.” Max went out of the bedroom. When he reached the landing he realized the ringing had stopped, but only because Dennis had answered the telephone. Max looked down into the hallway. Dennis was gazing up at him.

  “It’s for you, Dad.”

&nb
sp; “I’m coming.”

  “Some woman. Says it’s important.”

  Had Louise heard that? Max wondered. Denny’s high-pitched voice was loud and was bound to carry upstairs into the bedroom. Some woman. Says it’s important. Dear God, what if she’d heard that?

  Max picked up the receiver in the living room.

  24

  There were three men in the wood-paneled recreation room of Theodore Ronson’s house. It was a room hung with mounted stags’ antlers and the large bleak head of an elk whose big glassy eyes surveyed the world with sullen indifference. Ronson, who had served three terms as the mayor of Carnarvon, was a plump little man whose clothes seemed not quite to fit him. His pants shriveled around his ankles and the cuffs of his crisp white shirt rose over his wrists. The proportions of his body were too odd for the elegance he craved.

  As he looked across the room he found himself envying Pelusi, who managed to look passably trim in his rather loud plaid sports coat and polyester slacks, even if his clothes showed an execrable lack of taste. Bryce Dunning, the mayor’s administrative assistant, a silent man with the pallor of an undertaker, looked lean in his camel-hair jacket and dark brown slacks. Ronson thought it a jest of God that he had been born somewhat misshapen—his arms were too short and his legs dumpy—but he often consoled himself with the notion that it could have been worse.

  Pelusi was talking about the sheriff, Jerry Metger, and Ronson had to tune his brain back into the conversation around him. Pelusi was saying something about how Metger had come to his office asking curious questions, and then something else about Miles Henderson’s state of mind.

  Ronson leaned forward a little in his seat, glancing toward the oblong of light suspended over the pool table. He liked this room, his den of recreation. He liked the big guns in the display rack and the hunting trophies and the soft green baize of the pool table. He was at peace in this place. Even as he listened to Pelusi, who was still going on about Metger, he could maintain his equilibrium because the room made him feel a kind of a glow.

  Lou Pelusi said, “I don’t like the threat Metger represents. It makes me worry. And I don’t like Henderson’s cavalier attitude either. He’s lost it. His brain’s sawdust.

  “Exactly what threat does Metger represent?” Ronson asked. As mayor of Carnarvon he was best known as a kind of mediating influence, a moderate man who had only the town’s best interests at heart. Hadn’t new roads been built during his term of office? A new public swimming pool installed? There had been civic achievements, for sure. Ronson never listened to his few critics—those fuddy-duddies who complained that Los Angeles and San Francisco real estate moguls had Ted Ronson tucked in their hip pockets. He was his own man—as much as any small-town mayor could be.

  “That’s obvious, Ted. He isn’t asking funny questions for the good of his health. He knows something.” Pelusi looked worried, but that was par for the course when it came to the good doctor.

  “Such as?”

  “How would I know that? I can’t ask him straight out. I can’t just go up to him and say, Listen, Jerry, how come you’re asking these strange questions, can I? I just put him off as best I could.”

  Ronson swung his swivel chair to one side. “The Metgers are a meddlesome bunch. Like father like son.” He was thinking now of Stanley, Jerry Metger’s father, who languished these days in the nursing home, his mind flickering like an old candle. Ronson didn’t like to think about Stanley much. It was really too bad when you got right down to it, Stanley Metger had been such a vital man in many ways. It was a downright shame. Necessary, maybe, but a shame nevertheless. What had prompted Stanley, at his time of life, to start setting down on paper his memories of old Carnarvon, for God’s sake? What weird impulse was it to record stuff? It was one thing to tell stories when you had a few snorts under your belt, which was Metger’s way, but it was something else to write the goddamn things down and plan to print them in a private edition—something the tourists might buy. By common consent, Stanley Metger’s name was never mentioned in this room.

  “What could Jerry Metger possibly know?” Ronson asked.

  “I don’t know, Ted, but he looks like a hound worrying a goddamn bone,” Pelusi said. “I don’t like it.”

  “Okay, say he knows something,” Ronson said. “Is he going to go around telling people about it? I don’t think so. He knows how his bread is buttered, doesn’t he?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Bryce Dunning said in that strange high-pitched voice of his—he was like a man who had swallowed a whistle. “I went to school with Jerry. He’s a straight arrow.”

  Ronson adjusted the cuffs of his shirt. “I’ll have a quiet word with him. Feel him out. See what’s on his mind. Jerry Metger doesn’t worry me.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Pelusi said. “Metger’s one of those Boy Scout characters, at least that’s the way I’ve always seen him. Mr. Honesty …”

  Ted Ronson swiveled in his chair, watching morning sunlight slant through the louvered blinds that hung against the window. “Lou, would you put Jerry Metger out of your mind, for Chrissakes!” He swung around to face the physician. “He’s not going to be a problem.”

  Pelusi put his hands in his pockets. He was forever being told that he worried too much, that he harried things needlessly. A little paranoid—wasn’t that what Miles had called him? He gazed at Ronson and said, “I’m scared. That’s the bottom line. I’m scared. Conspiracies scare me.”

  “Conspiracies?” Ronson asked. “I don’t see any conspiracy around here. You see anything like that, Bryce?”

  Bryce Dunning smiled thinly, a wrinkle of purple lips. “I don’t see anything remotely like that, Ted.”

  Ted Ronson swiveled in his chair again. His short legs barely touched the thick rug. “What I see is protection, Lou. Protection for us. For the people of this town. For our livelihood. I mean to say, Lou, we’ve got a nice little town here, haven’t we?”

  Pelusi nodded. He was still thinking about Jerry Metger. Was he just overreacting to the sheriff? Was he letting a simple question alarm him? Maybe Metger had had nothing on his mind, maybe he’d just been passing the time of day. But Metger was one of those people in whom Pelusi perceived ulterior motives—he didn’t buy Metger’s simple boyish facade, not for a moment.

  Ronson said, “We all know this is a good place, Lou. We’re expanding. We’ve got a tourist industry worth a couple of million bucks a year and that’s growing faster than we can keep up with it. When the new hotel goes in on Stapely Hill, hell, you won’t be able to catch your breath. Our projected estimates suggest a fifteen percent increase in tourism next year alone.” Ronson tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “The nice thing is, everybody prospers. All the citizens prosper. Nobody’s left out, Lou. Including you.”

  Pelusi nodded, conscious of Bryce Dunning—who spooked him with his funereal demeanor—staring at him. “I know, I know this, Ted. And I don’t want to see anybody upset the applecart—”

  There was a silence in the room now. Bars of light dappled Ronson’s face and he blinked. “All your talk of conspiracies kind of depresses me, Lou. When I think of a conspiracy I feel bad. Sometimes it’s necessary for the general well-being of the population”—and here Ronson took a deep breath and his barrel chest swelled up—“that they don’t know everything that’s going on. Sometimes you have to exclude the people. For their own good. Now, I don’t call that a conspiracy, Lou.”

  Pelusi said nothing. Ronson was explaining his own peculiar brand of utilitarian politics, which involved a selective vocabulary. New meanings were given to old words. The thing was a conspiracy any way you happened to slice it. What did it matter if it was for the general prosperity of the town or not?

  Pelusi took out his watch and checked the time. He wasn’t going to mention to these two men what he had seen last night in a bad dream—the town of Carnarvon totally deserted, stores and houses boarded up, dilapidated cars motionless on the streets, the highway c
hoked with weeds.

  He wasn’t about to share this bleak vision with them. He would play his part in the conspiracy because he wasn’t courageous enough to do otherwise—he had grown accustomed, all too easily, to what he considered his comforts.

  Ronson clapped the physician on the shoulder. “Don’t look so goddamn gloomy, Lou. I’ll speak with Metger. I promise you.”

  “It might be wise,” Pelusi said. He looked at both men. The problem he sometimes had was that he still felt like an outsider in Carnarvon. These men, both of them born in this town, shared a common heritage that Pelusi had no part in. He had been hired from outside—he was the newcomer to the conspiracy. How easy it had been to slip into the whole thing, he thought. When Ronson had first explained it, it had all sounded amazingly plausible to him. Why scare the residents? Why frighten off the tourists? After all, Ronson had confided, winking—it’s not like it happens every other month, is it? And the inflated salary had helped assuage any doubts he might have entertained—Carnarvon paid a hell of a lot better than the hospital in Los Angeles.

  Ronson gripped his hand. “Go cure some people, Lou. Or whatever it is you doctors do.”

  Pelusi moved to the door. Ronson called out to him, “And smile, for God’s sake! Physicians shouldn’t look like death warmed over. It’s bad business practice.”

  Frog filled his pipe and stretched his legs beneath the kitchen table. Louise poured him a second cup of coffee. It occurred to him that there was a slight tension about her, hovering around her shoulders in the manner of a disturbed aura. There had been a time, once, when he would have sworn he saw auras hanging around people like flimsy scraps of laundry. Louise, on this pleasant morning, was gray.

  Frog sipped his coffee. Upstairs there was the sound of a shower running. Max, the doctor, performing his morning ablutions. Louise sat at the kitchen table, a preoccupied little light in her eyes—Frog thought she was some distance away right now.

  “Didn’t sleep well?” he asked.