“Yeah?”
“What’re you going to do now?”
“Finish my eggs.”
“And then?”
“Drive your sister home.”
“That all?”
“No. I’ll probably try and get some sleep. I’m feeling tired.”
Harold nodded. “I know what you mean.”
Rita came back in and filled our cups and we finished our food and coffee and soon she and I were getting into the Rambler and Harold was standing, filling the back doorway, like something permanent in the house, watching us go.
PART FIVE
DECEMBER 24, 1974 CHRISTMAS EVE
TWENTY-EIGHT
I looked down at the picture on the cardboard container. Turkey with dressing and potatoes and peas, buttered, with a smidgen of cranberry sauce, garnished with parsley, served on a china plate. I took the cold aluminum tray out and closed it up in the oven, set the heat on four hundred and the timer for thirty minutes. On my way to the couch I got myself a Pabst.
If you ever spent Christmas Eve alone, you know the kind of depressed I was. And putting John on the plane this afternoon hadn’t helped any.
I’d spent the better part of the rest of John’s leave trying to convince him not to get back in the Indochina soup like a good li’l fly. But he said it was too late for him to get out of it, said I might as well get off his back, the papers were all signed, but I had a feeling he wasn’t leveling: I had a feeling if he’d come home to something that seemed like home to him, he might’ve stayed. But Suzie Blanchard was seeing her ex-husband again, and his stepfather had been a big disappointment, and he’d killed a man.
So last night we got drunk on red wine, and I didn’t say a word about any of it, and he likewise gave me a period of grace, not saying anything about the Janet Taber/Sy Norman matter, which was still a sore spot for me.
Because John had been right the first time: solving Janet Taber’s “mystery” hadn’t made either her or me rest any easier. I thought finding “the truth” would help her in some vague metaphysical way, but it didn’t, because the kind of truth I found was one-dimensional; there was another kind of truth that couldn’t be gotten at, because the clues to it were the skeletons of events from lives that weren’t being lived anymore, because it was a truth locked away in the minds, the psyches, of dead people.
The puzzle pieces had been made to fit, and the surface level was now a picture you could look at, but what was underneath was something neither I nor anyone else could ever know. There were people involved I hadn’t ever met, people who were dead before I got there. I didn’t know the name of Richard Norman’s wife, for instance. Or the name of his little girl. I’d read their obituaries, but their names hadn’t seemed important enough to bother remembering.
For that matter, I didn’t know Richard Norman beyond his name, really. Or Janet Taber’s mother. Or Janet Taber, if you got right down to it.
I’d met her, but I didn’t know her.
I’d met Stefan, but I didn’t know him. Oh yes, he was the bad guy, he was who the killer turned out to be, and his killing machine was a man named Davis. But I couldn’t know what it was in Stefan Norman that let him have people killed, just as I couldn’t know what it was in Stefan Norman that made him weep for Davis. Or what it was in Davis that made him worth weeping for.
But these were thoughts. They didn’t get said. I was too drunk to articulate them and John was too drunk to understand them.
Later on, drunker still, he said, “You oughta call Rita.”
And I said I’d get around to it.
I had decided not to see Rita for a while, at least till the circumstances that brought us together had faded in my memory a little. Before, when John had first asked me about it, I’d said I broke it off early because of the hassles I figured a racially mixed couple would run into in this part of the country. But that wasn’t it. It was her brother maybe, things about him I knew that she didn’t, and a time of my life I was trying to put out of mind, even though she was a very pleasant part of that time. I’d see her later. Call her sometime.
I asked John why he wasn’t spending his last evening with Suzie Blanchard and he made a face and that’s when he told me her ex-husband had dropped around today and she was busy.
About then we started the second bottle and lots of things got forgotten.
By this afternoon, when I drove him up to the airport, he wasn’t John anymore. He was wearing his dress uniform and his hair was fresh-cropped and he sat rigid in his seat like a cardboard cutout. He was slowly being sucked back into that other person he was in that other world.
Brennan had offered to drive John to the airport, but John turned him down. That hurt Brennan, and I almost found myself wanting to make peace between them, but now wasn’t the time. John had idolized the guy for years, looked up to him as a “man’s man”; going into the Army right out of high school had been, partially at least, an effort by John to please his often remote stepfather. And now John had learned the facts of Brennan’s life, complete with politics and graft and imperfections, and was disillusioned. He wouldn’t be calling Brennan “sir” anymore. Not for a long while, anyway.
So I had driven him and now we sat and waited for his plane. The airport was swarming with people trying to get places for Christmas and we had little privacy. A young woman and her baby crowded me in the next seat, and a sailor was running his cap around in his hands in the seat next to John. Outside it was dark, though it was only around four; the darkness was clouds, mostly, and John pointed out at them and said, “Hope that doesn’t mean my flight’s going to be delayed.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “Maybe it’s going to snow. I kind of hope it does. Christmas isn’t Christmas without it.”
And that was pretty much the way the rest of our conversation went. Degenerated into impersonal chitchat. Once, when I asked John about where he’d take his R and R, he brightened momentarily and said he thought he’d go back to Bangkok and look up the girl he’d been with last time.
But soon he was sitting rigidly again, and then the plane was there and I had to watch him walk through a door where his ticket was checked and he disappeared. I went quickly out another door and got on the other side of the fence behind which John was walking toward the big silver jet, marching into the artificial wind of its exhaust. For a while I didn’t think he’d turn to look back, and when he finally did, about halfway between me and the jet, he didn’t wave or anything: he just let the John part of him take hold of his face for a second and he gave me that pained look friends give each other when they maybe aren’t going to see each other again.
I stood there and watched the jet go through its motions, the taxiing around, the takeoff, its exhausts screaming hot, hoarse, and then I stood there and watched some other jets do the same things. After a while it started to snow.
The timer went off and I went to the oven and got the TV dinner out. I lifted the foil off and the steam came up and hit me in the face and I walked the hot tray over to the sink and dumped its contents into the mouth of the garbage disposal.
I went over to a window and looked out. The snow had stopped already, but it was cold enough to keep the ground white.
I wondered if any restaurants were open Christmas Eve.
I got another Pabst and flopped on the couch.
The phone rang.
I grabbed the receiver off the hook, hostile at having my depression interrupted, and told myself not to be surly, after all, it’s Christmas Eve, and said, “Yeah?”
“Hi, stranger.”
Rita.
“Hi.”
“You wouldn’t know where a lady could find some holiday company, would you? I don’t think I can face a TV dinner all by myself.”
I smiled.
“Mal?”
“I’m smiling,” I said.
“You got people there? Am I butting into something?”
“Not at all.”
“I was hoping you weren�
��t busy, ’cause I been… dreaming of a white Christmas, if you know what I mean.”
I laughed. “Where are you?”
“Give you a hint: the walls are purple.”
“I’m on my way.”
I hung up, grabbed my coat, my keys.
I let the Rambler take off in the direction its nose was pointing, and thirty seconds later I was sitting at the stop sign, waiting to get onto Grand Street, waiting for traffic to subside and let me in so I could head for one of the two possible routes to the Quad Cities. Left lane traffic lulled and I had time to make it, but that would put me in the direction of the River Road, the scenic route along the Mississippi, over Colorado Hill. I waited and pulled out the other way.
EPILOGUE
1983
TWENTY-NINE
John was killed in 1975, while flying with Air America, during the evacuation of Vietnam.
Sy Norman died the same year; he left his house to the city, assuming the place would be turned into a museum. He should have so stipulated in his will, because when the new high bridge went in, in 1979, the city had the house torn down and a small open park put in its place, overlooking the river. A small plaque mentions Doc Norman and his cancer clinic and radio station; a larger plaque mentions Mark Twain and his penchant for Port City sunsets-the park is named Mark Twain Overlook.
Harold was remembered well in Norman’s will; and Rita-who is teaching full-time now, at a community college in Elgin, Illinois-says he’s opened a big-and-tall men’s shop in suburban Chicago.
Brennan is still sheriff; Jack Masters, Lori and the rest are still in the area, like me.
And as for me, I finally got around to writing that mystery novel, didn’t I?
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No Cure for Death m-1 Page 16
