He sat and waited for her. It confused him that she should feel as she did. It gave him the feeling that he was impersonating someone she wanted. When he tried to be objective about her, he could see her only as a willing victim of her own delusions. But when she was close, and his response was subjective, it did indeed seem like something so special it was worth whatever wounds would come to them. Greater than the sum of its parts.
In a little while she came back across the side yard toward him, her skirt swinging bright in the sun. She stopped in front of him and looked at him with a crooked smile. “Here I am with clothes on, and walking toward you, and suddenly I was so damned shy I couldn’t figure out how my arms were supposed to swing, and my knees kept bumping against each other. And by that icy pond I wasn’t shy at all. I love you. Darn it, Sid, when I say that you don’t have to look so anxious and uncertain, as if you didn’t know which fork to use. I’m not trying to make you say it too. Just be smug and relax and be glad to hear it. That’s all you have to do. I love you. See? Just look at your woman and listen to her say it. Come on, now. I gave Tom his shot and he went right back to sleep. Jane is fixing lunch for us. I’ll show you which will be your room.”
“I better get my stuff out of the …”
“Davie lugged it up to your room. Come on, dear. I’ll show you.”
They went up the stairs. He could remember the stairs. They looked smaller to him. Everything looked smaller, more worn and old. And there was a smell of sickness and medicines in the dusty air. She showed him her room. It was in the front west corner. It had been his mother’s room. The master bedroom was in the front east corner, across the wide corridor. The room on the west side of the house, separated from hers by a bath, had been fixed up for him. It was a tall, old-fashioned room with massive dark furniture, a corner fireplace, tall narrow windows, a double bed with high carved posts and an ornate walnut headboard.
“The same as last time,” he whispered.
“I know. When George arrives, we’ll put him right there across the hall from you. The other bath is beyond his room. That door there. We’ll share this bath between us. There are two other bedrooms in the back. Jane has one. Davie sleeps in a downstairs bedroom off the pantry.”
“Everybody is pretty far from the old man, aren’t they?”
“Not really. Let me show you.”
She took him back to her room. There was an intercom on the table beside her bed. She turned the volume up slightly, and he heard the slow Doom-thup, doom-thup, doom-thup of the sleeping heart of the old man, an eerie sound in the noon silences.
“The microphone is pinned between his sheet and his blanket,” she explained. “I don’t have to have it this loud. I can go sound asleep, and when there is the slightest change, I find myself going out my bedroom door, putting my robe on and heading for the stairs without even realizing I’m on my feet. Even if it should gradually get faster, that’s enough to awaken me.”
“It … it’s kind of terrible.”
“Not to me, Sid. It’s his heart. It’s a tired, courageous old heart, and it kept beating until he could see you. I love him. Part of the way I love you is the way I love him, and the sound of his heart is a closeness. Listen to it a little while. Please.” She turned it up further. She sat on the bed. He roamed to the window, listening to the relentless sound. In a little while he knew it would be something he could hear without it bothering him. You had to get over your feeling that each beat would be the last. But what if it was? It was the sound of life, and at ninety-two, he’d had more than his share.
He came back and leaned against the footboard and nodded at her. “I see what you mean. It’s all right, isn’t it?”
Her eyes were large and her face looked small as she met his gaze. “I have the most shameless and terrible hunger for you,” she said. “A devouring thing. You’ll be in here with me tonight. I wish it was night now. I can’t come to you. I have to stay where I can hear him.” She reached and turned it back to a place where he could just hear it. “This bed sags in the middle. Your mother’s bed. Your grandfather’s heart. Is it too much for you? Is it too strange?”
“No.”
“Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. That’s all I’ve had of you. Fifty hours? A little more. Tom courted your grandmother. He visited her for a year. He sat in the parlor with her and they talked together for an hour, every Saturday night. That’s only fifty hours, isn’t it? But he saw her in church.”
“Paula. Please …”
“Help me. I don’t doubt what I feel, but I have to make things sound better. Nothing is cheap, but it has to sound better. Emotions are going by too fast today. I laugh and cry without making a sound. You have a wife. My divorced husband is coming here Thursday so I can tell him I don’t hate him. Some horrible man wants you killed. And I don’t fit into my skin the way I did before. The seams have been taken up. Little scratchy things run up and down me. And somehow, what happened last night and this morning are still happening to me. Get out of here. Please get out and go unpack or something. Don’t touch me. Just walk out quickly. I’ll be all right in a little while. You have to give me a minute.”
He went out and closed her door and went to his room. He looked out his windows. He could look diagonally toward the road in front. There were big maples in the front yard, so dense that he saw a few isolated glitterings of blue as a car went by. They had seen him drive through the village. They would know, somehow, about the old man sending Paula Lettinger to bring the grandson home. Texas plates. One of the grandsons. Sidney or George. She had two boys by that Shanley.
The identification in his pocket said he was Sid Wells. But now, for the first time since Jacksonville, he was Sid Shanley. It gave him a little raw quiver of fear. He felt too exposed. But at the same time he felt a strangely sullen defiance. Maybe Paula had stripped some of the caution away, exposing the second layer of pure damned fool.
He unpacked quickly, and then opened the zipper compartment in the back of his suitcase and took out the package wrapped in yellowed plastic, laced with rubber bands. He took it out of the plastic and unwrapped the oily rag. It was a Japanese 25 calibre automatic, showing the pits of old rust spots. When he had been working a lot in Biloxi, he had found it wedged down behind the rear seat upholstery on a trade-in. He had cleaned it, bought ammunition for it, checked it out in an isolated place. At thirty feet he could be reasonably certain of hitting a circle eighteen inches in diameter. The clip was designed for ten, but the spring was so tired, it would push but six up into the chamber. He wiped the grease off and slipped it into the side pocket of his trousers, with a full clip, a load in the chamber, and the simplified safety locked on. It took up little more room than a cigarette case.
It made him feel ridiculous. Hero makes stand in Bolton, armed with deadly weapon. If the two possible decisions were to fight or to run, this little gun fell somewhere in between. It was a symbol of equivocation. This was a ticket to Mitty land, the hero snarl, and pocketa-pocketa while dastards reeled and fell on every side, begging mercy.
Jane Weese served lunch and ate with them on the small glassed-in porch on the east side of the house, on the side opposite the study where Tom Brower lay on his hospital bed. Jane was in her late sixties, a woman with a small head, a large cushiony body, a sweet vague manner, and a large, primitive-looking hearing aid.
“I would never know you were in the house,” she said. “Such a quiet little boy I never saw. And toward the end you took to following me. I’d look around and you’d be there, and you’d smile just a little bit. My land, we had a time getting you to smile. Once I reached too quick to pat your head, and you scroonched right down into a little ball with your arms around your head. It made me cry to see a little child like that.”
Sid looked over to Paula and saw the tears in her eyes. “Cut it out!” he said.
“I can’t help it. You should be a terrible person now, according to all the books.”
“Books!” Jane Weese s
aid with a sniff. “I had an aunt crippled up all her life from a stepmother lambasting her with stove wood when she was a little thing, and a sweeter dear person her whole life long you never saw.”
“I wouldn’t say my childhood did me much good,” Sid said.
“Do you mind if I watch you carefully and see what it did to you?” Paula asked.
“Be my guest.”
“I’ll watch you for a limited time. About forty years.”
“What’s going on around here?” Jane asked.
“Aren’t these little hot rolls delicious?” Paula said. “Jane makes them three times a week.”
“Very very good,” Sid said.
Paula tilted her head. She got up quickly. “Dr. Marriner. Don’t save anything for me, Jane. I’ve had enough, really.” She hurried off. He looked out and saw a portly man getting out of a red sports car in the driveway.
Jane Weese peered amiably at him and said, “That girl has been more like a granddaughter to Tom. In this year—more than a year—that she’s been here, she’s sat in there jabbering with him for hours on end. When he was up to it.” She sighed wistfully. “I was never that kind of company for Tom. They talk about deep things. You know?”
“She’s very intelligent.”
“You didn’t grow up to look like I guessed you would, Sid. You had a sweet little face. The most terrible thing in the world is when you were all alone, you couldn’t find your way back to us. I think of that a lot. It would have made all the difference to Tom. Years went by without a laugh out loud in this house, except maybe me and somebody bringing something to the door. Did you have enough to eat?”
“Yes, thank you.”
She cleared the table. He looked out and saw Paula talking to the doctor as he got into the car. When the doctor drove away, Sid met Paula at the front door as she came in. She said that Tom wanted to talk to both of them. They went in. He sat on the window seat, Paula on the straight chair beside the foot of the bed.
Tom worked the control buttons and elevated the upper half of his body a few inches. “I find it oddly distasteful to talk melodrama,” he said with a withered grin. “As if it were a kind of vulgarity. As I told you before, my boy, I realize that you have come to see me at some risk to your life. Mr. Fergasson has patiently educated me about such risks in our culture, and conquered my disbelief. We had discussed it. The hoodlum empire wishes you dead, for trivial reasons. They did not find you in Houston, so we can say they could not and did not trace you from there to here. And there has been no flaw in our security. Aside from the three of us and Fergasson, no one in Bolton knows of your lurid situation. There is an intrinsic interest in the long lost grandson rushing to the death bed. But no paper will cover it. We have no town newspaper or radio station. Somehow everyone gets to know everything anyway. If you act furtive, my boy, it will excite speculation. I think you should be a very plausible unremarkable fellow from Texas. Nobody in Bolton knows that you ever married, and nobody knows that you ever lived in Florida. So I rather think you would be safe right here indefinitely. Do you agree?”
“It makes sense. If they could have traced me back to you, they would have come looking here two and a half years ago. How do we know they didn’t though?”
“Because nobody could come into this town and find out anything without sticking out like a sore thumb. Gossip is this town’s industry, hobby and recreation. It always has been.”
“Sir, there’s one thing I want to get clear. I’m glad I came back. But it wasn’t really because I felt some special need to … find my roots.”
Paula interrupted. “I told him about the money after he said he’d come back with me.”
“I was pretty indifferent about coming back, sir. But there was one thing that swayed me. Paula didn’t know how this Fergasson located me. You see, it’s something I have to know. I understand he’s supposed to be very good, but if he could find me, somebody else could find me. I must have left some trail I don’t know about. I had to come back to find out how it was done.”
“Oh, that’s quite interesting, and quite clever. He had the Jacksonville background, and he picked up your trail in Atlanta long after you’d left there, of course. In Jacksonville you wrote the ads for the used car sales. You did the same in Atlanta. He got a lot of those old ads and he went through them and isolated tricks of phrasing and description, and sales gimmicks. He assumed you would still be in the same business, and in a metropolitan area, and be writing used car copy. He went through dozens of newspapers. He found that the ads placed by Trade-Way Motors in Houston had these same devices and turns of phrase. He went to Houston and found that a Sid Wells had composed the ads. He got a look at you, and he knew that it was the same man in the Jacksonville photographs, thinner and more suntanned, without the glasses and with a different hair style. So he took your picture and came back here and reported.”
Sid sat with a stunned expression. Then he smiled in a wry and reluctant way and said, “The son of a gun! I never thought of it. But right now I can think of one thing I used first in Jacksonville, and then in Atlanta, and in Biloxi and in Houston. You build traffic at the lot by selling some horrible junkers instead of scrapping them. A one cent sale. You buy the plates. First come, first served. It’s an old gimmick. But I used to corn it up by saying they were guaranteed unconditionally for three miles or three hours, whichever came first. A lot of other things like that too. People see the same old ads. You have to say something a little different. And he thought of a thing like that!”
“It’s why he’s expensive.”
“He would never find me the same way again, sir.”
“I needed to find you once. Do you mind being here as yourself, my boy, as Sidney Martin Shanley?”
“It feels strange. But I think I like it, for a little while.”
“You please me, Sidney. I want the town to know that the old man’s grandsons have come back. The wire from George says he will arrive tomorrow.”
Sid felt a little tremor of alarm. “Does he expect to find me here?”
Tom Brower looked at him, and suddenly there was no focus or sharpness in those ancient eyes. His eyes and mouth were vague. “ ’Licia, don’t be scared of the automobile, honey. That loud noise scares horses, but it doesn’t scare big girls eleven years old.”
Paula went quickly to him and touched his forehead. “Tom?” she said urgently. “Tom?”
He looked up at her. “Who are …” The mists went slowly, like a mirror clearing after breath has clouded it. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he looked furious. “Damn wanderings,” he said. “Senility. Where did I go to, Paula?”
“Alicia was eleven, and afraid of a car.”
He smiled. “I was a little bit afraid of it too. An enormous Buick, and sitting in it was like sitting in a tree house. We motored all the way to Syracuse in it, a tremendous feat. Mud and dust and stones and punctures. We started at dawn and got there just before dark. Forty miles. My wife was so exhausted she wept. But what were we saying when I … lost touch?”
“I was wondering if George knows I’ll be here.”
“No mention was made of you.”
“Sir, is there any way we can find out if any stranger or strangers come here looking for me?”
“I think setting it up would in itself cause too much talk, my boy. The chance is remote. I have the feeling your luck is good. I think it was bad for a long time, and now it has turned good again. Do you?”
Paula turned and winked owlishly at Sid.
“I feel better than I have any right to feel,” Sid said.
“Now I want you to tell me about …”
“Later!” Paula said firmly. “He’ll be here. You can talk and talk. But not all at once.”
“This child is insolent and domineering, Sidney. They put R.N. after their names and become impossible. All right. I’ll sleep. One last little crumb of life left, and she wants me to spend it sleeping.”
Sid left them. She
came out in a few moments. “I have to run down to the village for a few minutes, Sid dear. Walk me out to my car, and then you go and sit in the front room and listen for him. He might wake up, but I don’t think he will.”
He walked back to the barn with her. Her little English Ford was parked just inside the big doors, heading out. Behind it, in the shadows, was a high square black Chrysler, up on blocks. Davie was clipping the grass at the edge of the drive.
When they went into the barn, he pulled her over to one side, behind the shelter of the edge of the door and kissed her very thoroughly. There was a warm and lingering smell of dusty hay, of animals long gone. She said, when he released her, “You do respond well to your cues.”
“A girl says come with me to the barn, it isn’t too complicated.”
“I’ll be gone about fifteen or twenty minutes. When I get back, you can have a nap.”
“Is this some compulsion, to put everybody to sleep?”
“You only let me do about one third of the driving. And you have had a few unexpected demands upon you, you know. Let’s keep you all fed and rested.”
He faked a yawn. “Now that you bring it up.”
She laughed and got into her little sand-colored car and went chugging out and up the drive. He watched her out of sight and went back into the house. He looked in at the parchment silence of the old man, and then sat in the living room. He smelled wax and polish and dust. He looked at the worn places in the rug. The high old furniture was in solemn geometry, in silent rural conversation. He heard the slow snick of Davie Wintergreen’s shears, and the sleepy chirr of insects in the summer afternoon.
eight
No sound or smell of summer night came into the small suite in an old hotel in Syracuse where George Shanley lay sleeping. There was a clatter and roar of the two air-conditioning units that made the two rooms seem as if they were on some strange laboring conveyance that trundled on through the night.
On the Run Page 10
