“The phone call! My God, my God—”
“Also some handwritten pages, by that friend of yours—what was his name? Jeff Dullard, something like that?”
“Stollard,” I said, wondering if Julian had really got the name mixed up or if he’d intended a pun that did tickle me, furious as I was.
“We’d heard about that UFO Investigators group of yours. We wanted to find out more. What better way than to go into your house, borrow your files—”
“Borrow? When did you ever give them back?”
“We were going to mail them to you. Tom promised he’d do it. Don’t blame me that his world history teacher had to assign a research paper at exactly the worst time. We all read what you wrote, with considerable interest. Especially the chapter on the three men. That was brilliant in parts. All wrong, of course. We don’t know who the three men are either, but they’re not the way you imagined them. But the manuscript showed originality. Considerable analytic ability too.”
“So I get a B plus? Thanks a whole stinkin’ lot, Julian. I’m just so flattered.”
“We wanted you in the SSS with us. We tried to find a way to meet you. We knew you and that Jeff went on Saturdays to the Philadelphia library; your mother told Rochelle about that. We thought—”
“My mother,” I said. I stood up from the bed. I walked over to the window and contemplated the eight-inch gash in the screen. Plenty of bugs here to swarm into an open mouth. I could hear the mosquitoes buzzing, revving themselves up for their big evening. What was I doing a thousand miles from home, freshly awake at six in the afternoon, in a ratty motel with a juvenile delinquent?
“We thought, how could we get you up to the Rare Book Room? And so—”
“I get a phone call. From my dear friend Julian. ‘Count the days.’ ‘Follow the moo-woon.’ And like the dumb sucker I am—”
“Wasn’t me who phoned you. It was Tom.”
“Of course! I knew I recognized him, the second we met!”
Not the face, it turned out: the voice.
“Only,” I said, “I didn’t—”
“Put two and two together?”
I nodded.
“Naturally. That’s the part of your education we’re now in charge of. Putting two and two together.”
“You nearly killed my mother,” I said. “That doesn’t bother you?”
“No,” he said, and at first I thought he meant, no, it doesn’t bother me. “We would never have harmed your mother. Rochelle liked her. A kind lady, she said. Just horribly frightened.”
Should I try to explain that my mother could have had another heart attack when she saw our violated home? She’d barely survived the first one. The second would have killed her. “Frightened?” I said. I sat back down on the bed, keeping my distance from Julian. “Of what?” But of course I knew the answer: of death.
“Of being abandoned. By your father if she doesn’t keep him placated. She knows how miserable he is, how the marriage was wrong from the start. How he rages against the both of you for what’s gone wrong with his life.”
And is this my fault? You could argue it either way. I looked down at my hands. I have good hands, veiny, with strong, well-shaped fingers. The hands of a man who will do great good in this world. A mosquito hummed in my ear. I didn’t brush it away.
“Your mother turned to Rochelle,” Julian said. “She asked, very timidly—she thought Rochelle was a sociology major, remember—aren’t there societies where a man can take a second wife, a younger wife, and get his needs met through her? Those were the words she used. ‘Get his needs met.’ ”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“But you must. ‘A younger wife,’ your mother said. ‘A healthy wife.’ And then she looked at Rochelle, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘But he’ll love the old wife, won’t he?’ And of course Rochelle said, ‘Yes, he will’; what else could she say?”
“Julian. If you don’t shut up, I will walk straight out to the car, and—”
“Drive away? Leave me here? Your mother’s terrified of that too.”
“What?”
“Your father’s not the only one she’s scared will abandon her.”
I turned my head; I looked toward the window. It’s evening time in Kellerfield, I thought, just as it is here. “I won’t abandon her,” I said.
“Sure you will. You have to, to grow into yourself. But you can always say no; you have that freedom.”
“I do?” I said, and felt a burst of hope. In my mind’s eye I saw my mother, in her rocking chair in midafternoon, by the window in our kitchen, watching and waiting for me to come home from school. I could see her through the window, smiling, as I walked up the driveway. A glass of Pepsi-Cola and a bowl of pretzels—my favorite snack, since I was a little boy—would be ready on the kitchen table.
“Of course you can say no. Isn’t that what you said to that pretty little girl when she got up the nerve to ask you to put your arms around her and dance?”
“That was a dream!” I yelled—for how unreal, impossible, dreamlike it was that it could ever have happened, that Rosa and I had come so close to holding each other in our arms.
“If you say so.” Julian got up from the bed. He took his suitcase, stood it beside the door of the motel room. “Are you packed yet?”
“To go where?”
“Your choice. You can keep on with me to Miami. Or I can take you back into Jacksonville. There’s got to be a Greyhound terminal there somewhere. You can go home and be with your mother. You don’t have to join our life of crime, as you call it. No compulsion.” He opened the door. “I’ll wait in the car while you decide.”
“How much time do I have?”
“All you need.”
I don’t know how long I sat on the bed. I could have measured the time by mosquito bites. I thought of my father and how he might take a new healthy wife by whom he could have a child of health, a boy he’d be able to love. Also of Rosa and what must have gone on in her mind before she left, and I thought, It’s not comparable. Her mother beat her, tortured her. Mine is only dying.
I thought of the pain of growing. Of the guilt. Of how Rosa had the courage to endure both.
It was dusk when I went out to the parking lot. There sat the Pontiac, Julian in the passenger seat. This seemed natural, inevitable. I slid behind the wheel, turned the key in the ignition, shifted into first. “Where to?” he said.
“You sure you trust me with these car keys, Julian? Not to go running back to my mommy?”
“Drive,” he said.
Sometime after midnight, about halfway to Miami, we stopped at an all-night diner. A waitress brought us cherry pie and coffee. She was very young, blond and petite, and heavily pregnant. Her face was set in permanent exhaustion. I had to look two or three times before I was sure she wasn’t Rosa.
CHAPTER 13
IN MIAMI WE FOUND A SMALL HOTEL, CHEAP AND SHABBY BUT conveniently located, and slept until past sundown. We got to the airport at a quarter to ten that evening. Rochelle’s plane was due in twenty minutes. There was no place to park.
“This is hopeless,” Julian said as we circled past the terminal for the fifth time. “I don’t want Rochelle to come and find nobody there. Why don’t I leave you off here and you go to the gate? I’ll be along in a little while. There’s got to be some corner of this stupid lot that isn’t full.”
A few seconds later he and the car were gone. I marched into the terminal, straight to the arrivals board. Flight 257 from Albuquerque, due at 10:04, would be on time at Gate 19. It was just before ten o’clock now.
I hurried down a long, white, fluorescent-lit corridor. I was sweating all over. Would Rochelle come off the plane bare-shouldered, in the same evening dress she’d worn the last time I saw her? I ought to be wearing a suit and my best shiny shoes, not a checkered short-sleeved shirt with suntan pants and sneakers. I should be holding a corsage for her. My date, for my first prom.
Instead I carried
a hardcover edition of Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned, which Julian had lent me. Something to read in case the plane was late.
The area around Gate 19 was crowded. There weren’t any seats. I sat on the floor and leaned my back against the wall. A young Hispanic woman sat next to me, smoking. “Is everybody waiting for flight two-five-seven?” I asked her. She nodded without looking at me.
“May I have your attention please? United Airlines flight two-five-seven from Albuquerque, scheduled to arrive at ten-oh-four P.M., has been delayed. Currently anticipated arrival time is ten thirty-five.”
Well, that was a pity. Julian would certainly be here before Rochelle arrived. I wouldn’t need that corsage after all.
I opened The Book of the Damned and began to read:
A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded . . .
Yes. The damned are the excluded. The one lesson my idiotic school manages to teach. I’d learned it well, at the edges of conversations that didn’t include me, because I didn’t talk like the others or about the same things, and they knew it and so did I. Even Jeff. Now especially Jeff . . .
I snapped out of my reverie. Useless, this bitterness. The door from the runway was propped open, people filing in. The Hispanic girl stood in a corner of the gate area, passionately kissing a brown-skinned man with long, slick black hair. I got to my feet, brushed off my pants, wondering if I’d even recognize Rochelle when she came through the door. Twice I saw girls who I thought might be her. But they weren’t.
The line thinned to a trickle. Then it stopped. Plenty of seats now. I sat down; there seemed nothing else I could do. I went back to Charles Fort.
Battalions of the accursed will march, some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive . . .
The words had turned meaningless. I closed the book. A stewardess yanked at the door, and it swung shut. “Was this United flight two-five-seven?” I asked her.
She nodded. She hurried away. I wanted Julian to be here. Julian, I’d say to him. Rochelle must have missed her flight. How are we going to link up with her now?
But there wasn’t any Julian either.
I went back to the ticketing area. I couldn’t remember just where Julian had said he was going to meet us. The space around the ticket counters seemed darker than it had before, and a lot more deserted. I was puzzled. With so few people left in the terminal, there had to be parking spaces. What was taking him so long?
I wandered back and forth between the counters and the terminal doors, while a woman’s voice droned announcements over the PA system. One of these began, very gradually, to penetrate my awareness.
“Albert Bender, meet your party in the baggage claim area for United Airlines flight two-five-seven. Albert Bender, meet your party . . .”
Albert Bender?
The Bender of the three men in black? The Bender to whom Julian had been charging his phone calls? Bender had to be a common name. Surely there were Albert Benders in Miami, just as in Bridgeport.
“Albert Bender, meet your party . . .”
A few nights earlier, while Julian was driving, I’d asked about those telephone calls. He’d given a very long answer that made very little sense. I may have dozed off for part of it. But I remembered his saying, more than once: “I send a message. By using Bender’s name, I send a signal. You understand?”
I hadn’t understood. A signal for Rochelle? A message for Tom?
But maybe I was the one the signal was for. And it was being sent right now.
I ran for the escalator.
The baggage claim area for United Airlines was deserted when I got there. At the other end of the hall a large group of people, apparently passengers on a TWA flight that had just arrived in Miami, milled around and waited for their suitcases to appear. But the belt for United flight 257 wasn’t moving any longer. Only a few pieces of unclaimed luggage remained. Two dark-skinned men gathered the luggage onto carts and wheeled it off to some storage room. Both of them wore what I guessed was the uniform of the airport workers—black jacket and pants, black ties, black caps.
Cubans, they had to be. Refugees from Castro.
I bent over and examined the bags still on the belt. The light was pretty poor. But I could make out, on a tag attached by a small chain to the handle of one powder-blue suitcase, the name Rochelle Perlmann. There followed an address in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. A telephone number, with a Philadelphia area code.
I looked up. Through the plate glass window I could make out at least four taxis standing by the curb, presumably waiting for the TWA passengers. I could take the suitcase. I could get a cab to our hotel. I could wait there for Julian. Rochelle might have left a message for us inside the suitcase, explaining why she hadn’t been on flight 257. I picked up the suitcase. I began to walk toward the doors.
“Hey!”
I stopped and turned around. One of the baggage workers was walking toward me, grinning amiably. He was a tall, powerfully built man with a swelling stomach and a large pockmarked face.
“That your suitcase, kid?”
I looked down at the suitcase, still in my hand. “I think it is,” I said.
“Kind of a funny color suitcase for a fella to be carrying, wouldn’t you say?”
Again I looked at the suitcase, a bit longer this time. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess you might say it is.”
His grin broadened. He looked like he was about to laugh. I prepared myself to laugh with him.
“What’s your name, kid?”
He was at least forty years old. Yet I couldn’t shake the sense I was facing some loutish kid from my phys ed class, getting ready to gather his friends against me, to taunt me for their usual stupid reasons.
“Albert Bender,” I said.
“You got a claim stub for that piece of luggage?” came a voice from my left.
I turned to see the other baggage worker—small, wiry, snaggletoothed. I put the suitcase down and made a show of hunting through my pockets.
“I can’t—I can’t—can’t seem to find it,” I said. “I must have left it—”
“You must have left it on the plane,” the tall pockmarked man said. “Isn’t that right? You left it on the plane.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I left it on the plane.”
“Let’s have a look at that bag,” said Snaggletooth.
Neither he nor Pockface had a trace of a Cuban accent, or southern for that matter. Seen close up, neither of them had any Hispanic features besides their dark skin. The color had a strange artificial quality about it, as if they both had decided to stain themselves brown for some reason I couldn’t begin to fathom.
“Tag says Rochelle Perlmann,” Snaggletooth announced. “It doesn’t say no Albert Bender. Tell me, Al. What the hell you doing with Rochelle Perlmann’s suitcase?”
“Rochelle’s my sister,” I said.
“Your sister?”
“My sister. I’m picking up her suitcase for her.”
“Why can’t your sister pick up her own suitcase?”
I thought of telling them she’d gone to get the car and had asked me to bring the suitcase out to her. But then they might insist on my taking them to her or waiting with me until she arrived with the car. “She missed her flight,” I said. “I was supposed to come meet her, but she missed her flight. Seems like her luggage got on the plane, but she didn’t.”
“Thought you said you left your claim stub on the plane,” said Pockface mildly.
“I did? I said that? I—I—”
“Now it sounds like you weren’t on the plane at all,” said Pockface.
“I was—I was—I must have been confused. I got all flustered, I guess.”
“Flustered,” said Pockface. He seemed to consider this idea. “You’re a pretty nervous kid, Al,” he said. “You know that?”
“Where w
as your sister flying in from?” asked Snaggletooth.
“Albuquerque,” I said. “New Mexico.”
“We know where Albuquerque is,” said Pockface. “Been working at airports all our lives.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Snaggletooth, “is what’s a lady named Rochelle Perlmann doing being the sister of a guy named Albert Bender. How does that figure, Al?”
“She’s married,” I said.
“Married,” said Pockface.
“To Fred Perlmann,” I said. “In Philadelphia. About two years ago. Now she’s flying in from New Mexico, to visit—to visit the family.”
“Your family’s right here in Miami, huh?” said Pockface.
“That’s right,” I said.
“What’s your address?”
“Twenty-two-oh-eight Orlando Avenue,” I said.
This was the address of our hotel and the only Miami address I happened to know. Snaggletooth took a small notebook out of his pocket and, with a nasty snicker, wrote something down. I realized I’d just made one more mistake.
“What does your brother-in-law do?” Pockface asked. “For a living, I mean. Up in Philadelphia.”
“He’s a lawyer.”
“A Philadelphia lawyer!” said Pockface. He gave an odd snorting laugh. “It sure does figure. From his name, I mean.”
“He sounds like a gentleman of the Hebrew persuasion,” Snaggletooth said. “Am I right about that, Al?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re right about that.”
“Tell me the truth,” said Pockface. “Doesn’t that bother you, just a little bit? Your sister marrying one of them.”
Journal of a UFO Investigator Page 10
