Twilight Child

by Warren Adler

  “How come you left, Dad?” Chuck had asked as they sat in the car, its hood pointed into the sunset of the bay. He had wondered if he had painted too idyllic a picture, one that he truly felt in retrospect, but which did not quite jibe with the reality of the time.

  “No place to make a decent living,” he told the boy. “A man must have the courage to move on. It’s his duty.”

  His brother Ned, whom he hadn’t seen in years, and with whom he talked usually only on Christmas Day, had gone all the way to Kansas City to find a new life with his wife’s family, who had put Ned in the hardware business. She was a Catholic, and he had converted. The result was an army of kids working their way down into the third generation. Ned’s life was elsewhere and had been for a long time.

  But it was not only economic conditions that were responsible for Charlie’s leaving. The Depression had been a plague on the young people of Crisfield, but it had been the war that showed them that there was more to the world than this sleepy bay town. At least, that was what they thought. Coming back, especially that time he had come back with Chuck for the obligatory grand tour of his roots, the place had seemed like a paradise.

  “Great place to be a boy,” he told Chuck.

  “I wish you’d never left, Dad.”

  Hearing that took him by surprise, and he wondered if he had given the boy a brief taste of the same joy that he had known. Or was it that he was looking through the rosy prism of time, painting foolish pictures to impress his son?

  And then his grandson.

  He had taken Tray down to Crisfield a few months after Chuck had died. Just the two of them. It was a gorgeous spring day in late May and the blossoms had all sprung into bloom. To him, middle spring was always the best time for the bay. It had also seemed to signal the moment to put aside grief, to put Chuck’s loss in perspective, which meant accepting his death irrevocably.

  They had walked down Main Street to the municipal dock, and Charlie showed him the house where he had grown up. It had been miraculously reconditioned and painted, and there was a tricycle in the front yard and a playpen on the porch, with a baby chewing the railing and gurgling. A young woman came out of the house and waved, and they walked up the path to the porch to greet her.

  “My grandpa used to live in this house,” Tray told her.

  “Really? How lucky.” She turned toward Charlie and smiled. “We love it here. My husband works for the bank. It’s a great place to raise children. We were both brought up in big cities. This living beats it by a mile.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Charlie had said. “I’m just showing my grandchild around the old place.”

  “Would you like to go in?”

  “That would be very troublesome to you,” Charlie said, but it was obvious to the woman that it was what they wanted.

  “Not at all.”

  They followed her into the house, which had been rehabilitated and remodeled completely. Charlie could not restrain a quivering lump in his throat and had all he could do to keep himself from crying.

  “That’s where your old gramp slept with his brother Ned,” he told Tray when they had walked upstairs. One of the walls had been broken through to make a bigger master bedroom suite for the new owner and his wife. He gave Tray a running commentary as they moved from room to room. Coming down, he hesitated on the staircase.

  “Third step used to creak. You could never sneak upstairs because of it.”

  “Oh, we had a whole new staircase built in.”

  “You did a wonderful job. We had a lot of happy times here.”

  They went into the kitchen, where memories of his mother flooded back. He was not conscious of squeezing Tray’s hand.

  “Ouch, Grampa.”

  He had taken the boy’s hand and kissed it.

  “Better now, Tray?”

  The boy nodded.

  Later, he showed him Grampa and Granny Harper’s house and Grampa and Granny Waters’s house, and the other landmarks of the guided tour. Except, of course, where Maggie’s had been, although he did show him the spooning spot beside the bay. Then he had rented a day sailer, and they had spun around the inlet. He had let Tray hold the tiller.

  “Would you like to live here someday, Tray?”

  “Can we, Grampa?”

  “I was thinking about it. Someday when I retire. About eight years from now. Me and Gramma both. We’ll get a place down here and you’ll stay with us summers and we’ll go boating and fishing and clamming.”

  “What’s clamming?”

  He explained it as best he could, enjoying the boy’s rapt attention.

  “Would you like that, Tray?”

  “Oh yes, Grampa.” He jumped on him and hugged him around the neck, and Charlie hugged and kissed the boy on both cheeks and held him for a long time.

  “God, I love you, boy,” he said, holding back his tears.

  “And I love you, Grampa.”

  In a few years, he knew, manly reticence would interfere. It was a moment to be savored and cherished and held onto as long as possible. The day would come when the boy would be a man and Charlie would be just another old man with a scratchy beard and sour breath.

  “Are you my best friend, Grampa?” the boy asked.

  “For ever always.”

  “And Gramma, too?”

  “Of course.”

  Charlie had hesitated for a moment.

  “And Daddy, too. You musn’t ever forget your Daddy. He was your best friend, too.”

  “Even in heaven?”

  “Daddies never stop loving their little boys.”

  “And Mommies?”

  “Not Mommies either. Never, never.”

  Charlie remembered that day and how he had cursed time for not just stopping for a millennium or two, letting them be just as they were, a little boy and his grandfather sitting on the rim of the eternal bay as if it were the remote edge of the planet, basking in the great biological mystery of blood kinship and creation.

  In a strange way, that day had blunted his grief for his lost son, and he believed in his heart that God had offered him this child to rear and love in place of Chuck.

  Instead of anger, the memories only added greater weight to his already heavy heart. He was no longer the heroic figure of his youth and middle age—the adventurer, soldier, husband-lover, teacher-father, rugged hunter, fisherman, sailor—that could sustain him in the face of what he now knew was the real truth. Hadn’t he led a rather pedestrian life, an ordinary man in an ordinary job with an ordinary house and a run of lousy luck? In the end, everything had turned out to be a disappointment—Chuck,Tray, Frances. Now Crisfield. Maybe even Molly.

  No!

  In his thoughts, he heard Molly’s voice berating him for his self-pity and, worse, his self-abasement. He was not ordinary. No man is ordinary. Every man is like his own fingerprint, individual, a miracle, wonderful. It had been a very bad idea to come back to Crisfield with its rich memories of loving families and adolescent hopes and dreams. Life was simply chronologically unfair, he assured himself. An old man who allows himself to view things through the rosy filter of his lost youth plays a fool’s game. There was nothing to be found in the physical place of Crisfield that wasn’t better in the mind’s eye, where you didn’t get the intrusion of passing time. He shook himself alert like an old dog and, as the old cowboys used to say, hightailed it out of town.

  But by the time he got back to Baltimore, the realization that he had not found in Crisfield what he truly needed had come rushing back to afflict him, providing another disappointment to add to the list. With his luck, he thought bitterly, he might live as long as his father. Except his house didn’t have a porch. Nor did he have a son to visit him, if only to pass the time and validate that he had done his God-given duty of replicating the race in his own image. Christ, he thought, what am I going to do with the rest of my life?

  Or even the rest of the day?

  He had roamed through the house. In the kitchen he made
himself a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette, then walked into the den. He sat down on the chair and tried to devise mental strategies to fill up the vast emptiness that stretched out before him. He felt hollowed out, eaten away, corroded.

  Not like the shiny hunting rifles proudly exhibited in his gun-case. He had lavished loving care on those, had killed only as a real man kills. For food. And in war, only his enemies.

  Feeling for the key above the cabinet, he found it and unlocked the case, removing the shotgun he had bought for Chuck when he was seventeen. The boy had been ecstatic, he remembered, and they had gone up to the beautiful low ranges of West Virginia to hunt deer.

  They had rented a cabin tucked away in the midst of a pine stand and slept in sleeping bags laid over plank bunks. Wood smoke had parched the walls and crept into the nap of the woolen clothing in which they slept and hunted, and even the sweetly chilled fall air of predawn morning could not dispel the smell of it. They would roam the winding trails through the woods, eyes alert for tracks or droppings, signaling to each other with shrugs or looks or low grunts as they moved like phantoms to outwit and kill their unsuspecting prey.

  He had told Chuck, as his father had told him, and as his grandfather had told his father, that the joy was not in the kill but in the hunter’s ingenuity in the pursuit. The animal was to be respected and killed cleanly, to be mourned as a fellow creature who shared the earth, and blessed for providing the human species with food. In these hills Charlie and Chuck shared the common experience of manhood, a kind of secret soldiering that suggested intimacy and courage and the joyful freedom of cutting loose from domestication and women, of being free from the taming constraints of civilization and participating in something primal and profound.

  That year they had decided to go for buck only, the biggest they could find, inventing a horned giant with enough fire in his belly to attack even if provoked by nothing more than the human presence. Nasty Jake, they had dubbed him, deciding that they would settle for nothing less. They had come across less—does and mares, all over the place. But when they had the creatures in their sights they had moved their barrels out of range, firing to chase and not to kill. They had even found themselves a buck, but it was not one of sufficient size, and letting him escape to grow more menacing in the years to come had given them continuity and a future to believe in.

  Coming back to the cabin, bone-weary but exhilarated, they lit the wood fire of the old-fashioned wrought-iron range and threw steaks on a hot fry pan and slivers of peeled potatoes into boiling oil. They ate the steaks and french fries smothered in ketchup while the coffee perked happily on the range and the room was all aglow from the log fire crackling in the stone fireplace. Charlie was surprised at the remarkable accuracy of his recall, or so it seemed. He could see the orange flicker of the wood flame on Chuck’s smooth, boyish face, the ridge of black on his nail tips, the roughened chap on his own hands. He could taste the chewy meatiness of the steaks and the crisp hardness of the potatoes, the hot pungency of the strong coffee. He could feel the dried texture of the old table, the porcupine sprout of his own beard.

  The voice that floated with pristine accuracy in his mind’s ear was Chuck’s. Somehow in the magic chronology of memory the table had been cleared, the cracked plates washed and dried. The fire spit fierce sparks over the rim of the metal grate on which their boots rested. They had spread their sleeping bags on the floor in front of the fire and crossed their arms behind their heads, eyes raised to the exposed, smoke-soaked low rafters of the old cabin.

  “I hope we never get him, Dad.” It was still a boy’s voice, although the body was a man’s.

  “Who?” It wasn’t that his mind had wandered, just that in memory the response was necessary since he was also remembering himself.

  “Nasty Jake,” the boy said. “I want to see him, get close enough for a good shot, but I want him to get away. Next year, too. And the year after that and the year after that.”

  “With that attitude, we’ll never get him. You’ve got to want to get him.”

  “I’m not saying we shouldn’t stalk him and nail him in our sights. I want him to know we can get him. I just want him to keep going.”

  Never mind that Nasty Jake existed only in imagination. He had become as real as he had to be.

  “Kind of defeats the purpose of the hunt, doesn’t it?”

  “The thing is—” The boy seemed to stumble over his words. “If we keep him alive and free, then he’ll be around to keep us challenged. And we’ll always have him.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it. But suppose another hunter gets him.”

  “Not him, Dad. Not Nasty Jake. He’s ours. Yours and mine.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “He’s ours,” the boy repeated.

  “Damn right.”

  And so he’s still out there somewhere, Charlie thought, spun back into present time by the unbearable burden of loss. Chuck’s share of Nasty Jake was to have been handed over to Tray. It was against the natural flow of events to prevent such things. It was wrong, repellent, selfish, insensitive. He had felt himself exploding with anger, hardly aware that he had risen from the chair and walked over to the gun cabinet where, in a drawer below the case, he kept his shells. Also without realizing it, he had broken the stock and loaded two shells in the chambers, then returned to the chair, the rifle resting across his knees, safety off, finger on the trigger.

  He had wondered if the time had finally come to kill Nasty Jake.

  9

  “I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Charlie said for about the fourth or fifth time.

  Robert Forte looked toward Molly, then up at the ceiling. Actually, Molly thought, he was being patient. Charlie had been difficult all morning, even before they had arrived at the lawyer’s office. They had stopped first at the bank, where the manager told them there would be a penalty for cashing in their money market certificate thirty days earlier than it was due.

  “That’s not very fair,” Charlie told the neat, crisply dressed young woman behind the desk. They were everywhere now, Molly thought, like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Well-groomed, confident younger women. Where did they learn to use makeup so well, and to talk with such command and assurance? She glanced at the woman’s hands, smooth and creamy as alabaster, and hid her own liver-spotted ones under her pocketbook. The woman was devoting most of her conversational attention to Charlie, who did not take to her kindly.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said to Charlie. “If you wait thirty more days, there will be no penalty.” Officiously, she pointed out the rules on the back of the certificate.

  “I can read,” Charlie said. “I still think it stinks.”

  Molly might have intervened at that point, but she held her silence. Forte had asked for a five-thousand-dollar retainer and, bitch though he might, Charlie was determined to deliver as scheduled. A matter of pride, he had told her at breakfast. A deal is a deal.

  “I’ve been working with this bank for thirty years,” Charlie said as he signed the certificate and passed it along for Molly’s countersignature. “Now they’re always looking for the edge. Wasn’t that way before, was it, Molly?”

  Molly nodded, as if with high conviction. Actually, she had always found the bank personnel patronizing and officious. This young woman had made them appear even more so.

  “Would you like a certified check?” the woman asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Charlie had replied.

  He had filled out a deposit slip that lay on the desk before her. A certified check might have made it appear that they were trying too hard to convince the lawyer that they really did have the money to finance the case. He had already written the check and put it in an envelope, which was in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “We are grateful for your business, Mr. Waters,” the young woman said, flashing one of those synthetic television commercial smiles.

  “We do it all for you,” Molly hummed,
handing her the certificate. The woman looked at it closely in what seemed to be a deliberate gesture of uncertainty, turned it over, then got up and walked with sleek arrogance to the far side of the teller’s counter.

  “They own the world now,” Charlie said, following her with his eyes. Had he meant the young, or women? There were times when she challenged his view. Not today. She nodded in grudging agreement, reminding herself that they had also invaded the school system.

  “Like Frances—young, unfeeling, and indifferent,” he muttered. “I’d rather have given that money to Tray.” He shook his head. “What a waste.”

  It was, of course, a hint of what was to come. Driving downtown, he was sullen, and she noted that his lips moved soundlessly. Was he starting to talk to himself again? she wondered, suddenly alarmed.

  “Stop that, Charlie.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Cussing under your breath.”

  The brief rebuke had stopped his lips from moving, but he remained uncommunicative all the way to the office. His first act was to hand the lawyer the envelope, which remained on the desk all morning. Forte had called in a stenographer, who had brought one of those machines that they used in court.

  At first, the lawyer had only asked for facts, a kind of personal history—dates of birth, where they had been raised, what schools they had attended, occupational statistics for both of them, his marine record, their church affiliation. Nothing controversial. Forte got up from his desk and walked to the window, looking out at the harbor. Turning, he began to pace the room, straightening a picture, lifting his coffee cup.

  “Thank you, Miss Farber,” he said, after nearly an hour of questioning. The stenographer gathered up her equipment and left the room. Then he sat down again at his desk, a ball-point pen poised over his yellow pad, and turned to Molly.