The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  She turned her face toward Metger now, and her mouth hung open, slack with grief. “I remembered this boy. That was different, Miles Henderson said. The two cases were totally different. But they’re not. They’re exactly the same, Sheriff. Miles Henderson lied about that.”

  A strange sobbing noise came from her. She swayed a little and Metger had to hold her by the arm.

  “If it’s so rare, how come it happened twice in the space of fourteen years? How come, Dr. Henderson? Suppose you give me an answer for that one.…”

  Twice, Metger thought. And Anthea Ackerley and that makes it three. Three times since 1942.

  Florence Hann moved away from him now. She stood staring down at the sad little marker.

  Metger was afraid suddenly, afraid of the night, of the impenetrable dark, of the yellowy Stardust that floated up from the unseen town below, afraid of the birth of his own child.

  He thought of all the dead that lay beneath his feet. He thought of dead children, of something that came up like some god-awful hand and snatched them away.

  “Bobby was the sweetest thing,” the woman said. “You don’t know how sweet that boy was. All you ever saw was what he turned into. You never got to look into that boy’s heart, did you?”

  “I never did,” he answered.

  “Probably you found him funny,” she said very quietly.

  Metger didn’t answer. Bobby Hann was a shadow to him now.

  Florence Hann stepped backward, out of the range of the flashlight. “Right in front of my eyes, that kid wasted. I watched him waste. Day after day after day.” She turned her face up to the sky. “Nobody knows how to cure something like that. All they know around here is how to keep it quiet.”

  Jerry Metger heard branches part in the dark behind him.

  The wind again, he thought.

  Just the wind blowing across this damned place. And somewhere a suggestion of rain.

  “Let me take you home, Florence.”

  She stumbled against him. She was no longer so sure of her footing, her surroundings. The darkness was treacherous.

  “Seeing them waste,” she said. “That’s the worst of all.”

  37

  In the hour between darkness and dawn, when the sky is about to crack with the first few splinters of weak light, Louise got out of bed and went downstairs. All night long her sleep had been fitful—dreamless when she found it but shallow at the same time, like floating in four inches of tepid water. She made herself tea in the kitchen and sipped it. She lit a cigarette.

  Max had slept like a baby all night long. She’d listened to the steady rhythm of his breathing—unconcerned, carefree sleep. Maybe that was fine, maybe that was okay, because maybe, finally, he had nothing on his conscience and she was the one overreacting to a situation that didn’t exist. Or had he taken some kind of sleeping pill to carry him over the edge?

  She took her tea into the living room. She turned on the lamp and impulsively opened the Carnarvon Telephone Directory, a thin volume with a sprinkling of Yellow Pages at the back. Under the heading of “Motels” she found the name of the place where Connie Harrison said she was staying. The Huckleberry Inn—cute, very cute. Louise stared at the number, then shut the book. Why had she checked that anyhow? To make sure it existed? That last night’s encounter in the restaurant had really taken place?

  Damn right it had taken place—the recollection was like a wasp’s sting. She sat on the sofa, finished both her tea and her cigarette, and hugged herself, rocking her body back and forth because the air in the house was chill. Why didn’t Frog have a telephone in his van? She wanted to speak to him—he’d be sympathetic, understanding, he’d listen to her. All at once she was very lonely.

  She got up, walked around the room. Shivering in her robe, she looked out the window.

  In the sky there was a solitary strip of light now, very pale, slender as a crack in a mirror. The landscape suggested unreality, another world, an unmapped portion of the planet. I want to be happy, she thought. Why did that seem so much to ask? She pressed her forehead against the glass, over the surface of which lay streaks of thin rain.

  She went down to the kitchen. Dennis was methodically breaking eggs into a mixing bowl.

  “You’re an early bird,” Louise said, surprised.

  Dennis appeared not to hear her. He smacked his fourth egg against the rim of the bowl and let it slide out of the shell. Louise went toward him. She laid her hands on his shoulders and the boy, seemingly startled, jumped.

  “Got you,” Louise said. “The furtive chef.”

  Dennis said, “You sneaked up on me.”

  “I’m light on my feet.” She made him turn around to face her because she wanted to kiss him. But the kid, as if he were embarrassed, squirmed away from her touch, stepping to one side and dodging her outstretched hands.

  “What’s up?” she asked. “Don’t you want your mother to kiss you? Awww.”

  He stood beside the stove, egg whisk in one hand. There were small dark circles under his eyes and his skin was pale and tiny pinpoints of sweat glistened on his forehead. She moved closer to him, noticing now how the flesh on the back of his hands was peeling, coming away in small flakes. Too much sun, she thought. Too many hours outdoors working on that damned pickup truck. Freckles and peeling skin. All at once she was glad the Summers were going because then Denny wouldn’t have that goddamn truck to keep him outdoors all the time.

  “Are you feeling okay? Is something wrong, Denny?”

  He shook his head. When he spoke his voice was unusually petulant, even shrill. “I was trying to make my goddamn breakfast in peace!”

  “Denny,” she said. That tone—where did that come from? “I’ve never heard you talk to me like that.”

  He turned his back on her, started whisking the eggs.

  “Are you listening to me?” she demanded.

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” he said, as if he were bored by her presence, her questions, and just wanted to blow her aside.

  She caught him by the shoulder and spun him around to face her. There was a terrible urge inside her to raise her hand and slap him, but she caught herself in time. What would she be striking out at anyhow? Her own frustrations? Her own anxieties? Something was bothering the boy—she had to know what. And she saw it in his eyes now, a worry, a muted concern, something he wasn’t going to talk about.

  “Denny,” and she kept her voice quiet. “What’s the matter? Tell me. If you’re sick, we’ll get your father to look at you. Just tell me.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re sweating and you’re pale and you look like you haven’t slept in days. Don’t tell me you’re fine. And your hands—the skin’s dry.”

  The boy stared at her; his look was hard.

  She turned away. Leave him alone, she thought. Let him come out of this mood by himself, whatever it is. She walked to the doorway, where she paused and looked back at him. He’d never raised his voice to her before; she’d never seen such a weirdly defiant look on his face either. Christ, what was going wrong with this family? Her family? She could hear things crumbling, breaking apart.

  “Denny,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I told you.”

  She watched him beat the eggs and then she climbed the stairs. Halfway up, she stopped. It’s all going wrong, she thought. Everything was falling apart around her and she didn’t know how to stop it, how to put things right, how to make good again.

  She went on up to the landing, pausing again when she reached the bedroom door. She could hear the steady sound of Max’s breathing. She was reluctant to go inside. Reluctant to look at Max. She fidgeted with the cord of her robe.

  From downstairs she heard fat sizzling inside a frying pan and after a moment the smell of eggs floated up toward her with nauseating intensity. The cranky boy cooks his greasy breakfast, she thought, and she pushed the door open, stepping inside the bedroom, where Max lay asleep.

  An ill-tempered
son. A secretive husband. It was a depressing little catalogue.

  She moved to the bed, placing herself quietly on the edge of the mattress, thinking—for some reason—of that blue ribbon floating up from Charlotte Summer’s skull and the old woman’s fingernails scratching the flesh of her son’s back. Playful Charlotte. Nice playful Charlotte.

  Max opened his puffy eyes.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  Louise smiled wanly.

  “No breakfast in bed?” Max asked.

  She shook her head.

  “No cup of coffee? No San Francisco Examiner? What kind of room service is this?”

  Louise gathered the edge of the blanket and crumpled it between her fingers. “I want you to do something, Max.”

  “Sure.”

  “I want you to take a look at Denny.”

  “Why? Is he sick?”

  Louise hesitated. She gazed in the direction of the sun deck. She said, “I think he may be coming down with something.”

  “Say aahhh.” Max peered inside Dennis’s throat, saw nothing out of the ordinary. He placed his long fingers at the sides of his son’s neck. There was no swelling. Since Max hadn’t thought to bring a stethoscope with him—never imagining any need for the tools of his trade—he couldn’t listen to Dennis’s chest, but he could hear the boy wheezing a little even without the instrument.

  “So what’s the scoop?” Dennis asked in an impatient way. “Am I going to live?”

  “You’ve got a long life ahead of you, kid.” Max took his son’s hands in his own, flipped Dennis’s over, looked at the backs of the boy’s wrists. The freckles he’d seen there before were more numerous now and the skin was peeling, especially in the spaces between the fingers. “Do these still itch?”

  “It’s nothing much,” the boy answered.

  “You’re using the calamine?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “I want you to start rubbing moisturizer into your skin as well as the calamine. Your mother’s got some in the upstairs bathroom.” Max rose from the chair where he’d been sitting. “Use it liberally, work it into your skin as well as you can.”

  Max gazed into the boy’s face. There were dark half-moons hanging under his eyes, which indicated sleeplessness, but the kid had said he was sleeping okay. Maybe what was happening here, Max thought, was a recurrence of allergies. He knew that allergies obeyed no specific laws—they could disappear for years and then, without warning, attack long after you thought they’d been outgrown.

  Louise was smoking a cigarette at the kitchen table. She stubbed it out, then stood up. She laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  Max said, “He’s going to be fine.”

  Louise glanced at Dennis, who seemed anxious to be out of the kitchen. Max’s examination had been quick, almost cursory, and she wanted to make a joke about getting a second opinion, but the atmosphere wasn’t right for even the mildest kind of humor—she was still tense from the encounter with Dennis. The air in the kitchen reeked from the smell of scrambled eggs and she thought she would choke on it. She pushed the window open, allowing the damp perfume of the pines to infiltrate the house.

  “Am I confined to bed or what?” Dennis asked. He looked perfectly sullen, Louise thought.

  “You’re not confined to bed,” Max replied. “But you ought to stay out of the sun.”

  “I won’t have much trouble doing that,” and Dennis indicated the swollen gray sky that was lit now by a muted, indistinct sun behind clouds.

  Max poured himself a cup of coffee. Cup rattled against saucer, a small cacophony. Everything is nervy today, Louise thought. Everything has an edge against which you might cut yourself. She longed to step out of the house and go up through the trees, aimless and free and unconcerned. She was thinking about Frog again. Could she ever find the place where he lived? Or would she lose herself in the green-gray forest? She envisaged a skeleton of herself found, fifty years later, by some passing hiker—an assembly of bones with no identifying peculiarities.

  Dennis went out of the kitchen. After a moment she heard the sound of the front door closing and the boy’s footsteps creaking on the porch and then he was gone. She looked at Max. He isn’t here in this room with me, Louise thought. He’s miles away, elsewhere, receding like a flimsy thing on a strong tide. He was thinking about Connie Harrison—what else could make him so utterly distracted?

  “I think I’ll take a walk,” she said.

  “Any place in particular?”

  She shrugged. She wanted to come back with something sharp, like Yeah, Carnegie Hall or Sure, Fisherman’s Wharf, but at the same time she didn’t see much point in being abrasive. Basically, what she really wanted was to get out of this house, out of Max’s company. She wanted the deep forest around her and the sounds of birds filling the air and some sense of liberation, even if it were illusory. She looked at Max’s face. He was gazing down inside his cup, like some old biddy trying to tell the future from the pattern of coffee grounds or tea leaves.

  “Are you sure Denny’s okay?”

  Max sighed. “I’m sure.”

  “It just seemed …” She hesitated.

  “Seemed what?”

  “You examined him quickly, that’s all. You didn’t take your time over it. It wasn’t like you, that’s what I’m trying to say.”

  Max frowned. Restlessly now, he moved up and down the kitchen. He rubbed his hands together. “He’s all right, Louise. Believe me.”

  “He doesn’t even sound like himself.”

  With a motion of his hand, Max dismissed her—her concerns, her worries, he dismissed everything with one slight karate chop in the air. She heard his hand swish through space. She stepped out into the hallway and stood at the foot of the stairs.

  All around her the house made dripping sounds—the recent rain slithered out of eaves, rolled down the cedar roof, dropped from the sun deck and trickled off the roof of the porch—and Louise thought of a large dark dog, a very damp dog, shaking itself free of moisture.

  She went outside.

  38

  Theodore Ronson said, “My point is, I don’t think it looks very good for the sheriff of our town to be visiting strange places in the company of—shall we say—a woman whose mental condition is known to be more than just a tad odd, Jerry.”

  Ronson, with the scrubbed pink look of a man who has come straight from a sauna, wore white shorts and a white Izod shirt. He had a pair of Vans on his feet—black and white checks.

  Behind him stood his chief administrative assistant, Bryce Dunning, with his prominent Adam’s apple and vacant sky-blue eyes. Dunning’s hair was wet and slicked back and there were little patches of dampness on his beige shirt.

  They must have come from the Carnarvon Health Club, Metger thought. There, in the privacy of the steam room, they must have discussed the nocturnal comings and goings of their appointed sheriff. Metger closed the door of the living room; he was conscious of Nora out in the kitchen, moving back and forth between the sink and the stove. A smell of bacon drifted through the air.

  “Why don’t you both sit down?” Metger asked.

  Neither man moved. Ronson said, “Are you hearing me, Jerry? Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m listening,” Metger said. He glanced at the TV a second. A Saturday morning movie was playing. Randolph Scott was talking to Ronald Reagan and they were both dressed like West Point cadets. “Maybe you ought to listen to me, Ted. I don’t like the idea of being followed. It doesn’t agree with me. If I choose to go anywhere, that’s my business.”

  Ronson smiled. “Jerry, Jerry, this is a small town. People talk.”

  “They don’t talk enough,” Metger said. “Some things they don’t talk about at all.”

  “Is that so?” Ronson asked.

  “That’s so.” Metger killed the TV. He looked at Bryce Dunning. Those pale blue eyes, set in some other face, would have broken ladies’ hearts. But on Bryce Dunning they just seemed pallid and bleached.
>
  Ted Ronson moved. His new Vans made cracking sounds. “What are you working on, Jerry? I mean, can we expect a request for an exhumation order or something pretty soon?” Ronson and Dunning laughed, those quietly conspiratorial laughs common to bureaucrats who share a lot of memos together.

  Ronson knows, Metger thought. Ronson and Dunning. They both know. They know it as well as Miles Henderson. Presumably Lou Pelusi too. And who else? Where in the name of God does it stop?

  They know about the dead children and they want it kept locked inside a box that nobody’s ever going to be allowed to open.

  Three children had died over thirty years. From the same ailment. But what did it mean? What did it really mean?

  “You want to know what I’m working on, Ted?” he said. “You’ve got your spies. Ask them.”

  “Spies,” Bryce Dunning said. “We don’t have spies, Jerry. This is just a small friendly town, for heaven’s sake. You’ve seen our slogan as you drive in—CARNARVON, TOWN WITH A WELCOME IN ITS HEART? What’s all this about spies?”

  “We just happen to be curious, Jerry,” Ted Ronson said.

  Bryce Dunning nodded. “Curious about our sheriff running around graveyards in the dead of night.”

  They’re quite a double act, Metger thought. He wondered if they rehearsed until they got it down pat and neat. And then he wondered about the conspiracy of silence and how far down it might go. Did they all get together in silent rooms and discuss the comings and goings of their sheriff in solemn tones? Or was it more lighthearted than that? Did they meet and laugh about how good old Jerry was running around like a jackrabbit with a firecracker up its ass?

  “You said the other day you liked your job,” Ronson remarked. “Am I to assume you might be looking for a change now? Like a gravedigger’s job?”

  “Droll,” Metger said.

  Ronson shrugged and glanced at Bryce Dunning. Dunning, shifting the weight of his body from one foot to the other, cleared his throat. “You go up to the Ace of Spades much, Jerry?”

  Metger gazed at the mayor’s assistant. What was coming down now? he wondered.