by Стивен Кинг
“Could be no more than the sound of his breathing getting worse,” I said. “That alone might be enough to scare a child. Or maybe he had some kind of spell while she was there. What about you, Mattie?”
“Well. . one day in February Lindy Briggs told me that George Footman had been in to check the fire extinguishers and the smoke detectors in the library. He also asked if Lindy had found any beer cans or liquor bottles in the trash lately. Or cigarette butts that were obviously homemade.”
“Roaches, in other words.”
“Uh-huh. And Dickie Osgood has been visiting my old friends, I hear. Chatting. Panning for gold.
Digging the dirt.”
“Is there any to dig?”
“Not much, thank God.” I hoped she was right, and I hoped that if there was stuff she wasn’t telling me, John Storrow would get it out of her. “But through all this you let Ki go on seeing him.”
“What would pulling the plug on the visits have accomplished? And I thought that allowing them to go on would at least keep him from speeding up any plans he might have.” That, I thought, made a lonely kind of sense. “Then, in the spring, I started to get some extremely creepy, scary feelings.”
“Creepy how? Scary how?”
“I don’t know.” She took out her cigarettes, looked at them, then stuffed the pack back in her pocket. “It wasn’t just that my father-in-law was looking for dirty laundry in my closets, either. It was Ki. I started to worry about ICI all the time she was with him… with them. Rogette would come in the BMW they’d bought or leased, and Ki would be sitting out on the steps waiting for her. With her bag of toys if it was a day-visit, with her little pink Minnie Mouse suitcase if it was an overnight. And she’d always come back with one more thing than she left with. My father-in-law’s a great believer in presents. Before popping her into the car, Rogette would give me that cold little smile of hers and say, “Seven o’clock then, we’ll give her supper’ or “Eight o’clock then, and a nice hot breakfast before she leaves.” I’d say okay, and then Rogette would reach into her bag and hold out a Hershey’s Kiss to Ki just the way you’d hold a biscuit out to a dog to make it shake hands. She’d say a word and Kyra would rhyme it. Rogette would toss her her treat—woof-woof, good dog, I always used to think—and off they’d go. Come seven in the evening or eight in the morning, the BMW would pull in right where your car’s parked now. You could set your clock by the woman. But I got worried.”
“That they might get tired of the legal process and just snatch her?”
This seemed to me a reasonable concern—so reasonable I could hardly believe Mattie had ever let her little girl go to the old man in the first place. In custody cases, as in the rest of life, possession tends to be nine tenths of the law, and ifmattie was telling the truth about her past and present, a custody hearing was apt to turn into a tiresome production even for the rich Mr. Devore. Snatching might, in the end, look like a more efficient solution. “Not exactly,” she said. “I guess it’s the logical thing, but that wasn’t really it. I just got afraid.
There was nothing I could put my finger on. It would get to be quarter past six in the evening and I’d think, “This time that white-haired bitch isn’t going to bring her back. This time she’s going to…’” I waited. When nothing came I said, “Going to what?”
“I told you, I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve been afraid for Ki since spring. By the time June came around, I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I put a stop to the visits. Kyra’s been off-and-on pissed at me ever since. I’m pretty sure that’s most of what that Fourth of July escapade was about. She doesn’t talk about her grandfather very much, but she’s always popping out with “What do you think the white nana’s doing now, Mat-tie?’ or “Do you think the white nana would like my new dress?’ Or she’ll run up to me and say “Sing, ring, king, thing,’ and ask for a treat.”
“What was the reaction from Devore?”
“Complete fury. He called again and again, first asking what was wrong, then making threats.”
“Physical threats?”
“Custody threats. He was going to take her away, when he was finished with me I’d stand before the whole world as an unfit mother, I didn’t have a chance, my only hope was to relent and let me see my granddaughter, goddammit.” I nodded.”
“Please don’t shut me out’
doesn’t sound like the guy who called while I was watching the fireworks, but that does.” “I’ve also gotten calls from Dickie Osgood, and a number of other locals,” she said. “Including Lance’s old friend Richie Lattimore.
Richie said I wasn’t being true to Lance’s memory.”
“What about George Footman?”
“He cruises by once in awhile. Lets me know he’s watching. He hasn’t called or stopped in. You asked about physical threats—just seeing Footman’s cruiser on my road feels like a physical threat to me.
He scares me. But these days it seems as if everything does.”
“Even though Kyra’s visits have stopped.”
“Even though. It feels… thundery.
Like something’s going to happen. And every day that feeling seems to get stronger.”
“John Storrow’s number,” I said. “Do you want it?” She sat quietly, looking into her lap. Then she raised her head and nodded.
“Give it to me. And thank you. From the bottom of my heart.” I had the number on a pink memo-slip in my front pocket. She grasped it but did not immediately take it. Our fingers were touching, and she was looking at me with disconcerting steadiness. It was as if she knew more about my motives than I did myself. “What can I do to repay you?” she asked, and there it was. “Tell Storrow everything you’ve told me.” I let go of the pink slip and stood up. “That’ll do just fine. And now I have to get along. Will you call and tell me how you made out with him?”
“Of course.” We walked to my car. I turned to her when we got there. For a moment I thought she was going to put her arms around me and hug me, a thank-you gesture that might have led anywhere in our current mood—one so heightened it was almost melodramatic. But it was a melodramatic situation, a fairy tale where there’s good and bad and a lot of repressed sex running under both. Then headlights appeared over the brow of the hill where the market stood and swept past the All-Purpose Garage. They moved toward us, brightening. Mattie stood back and actually put her hands behind her, like a child who has been scolded.
The car passed, leaving us in the dark again… but the moment had passed, too. If there had been a moment. “Thanks for dinner,” I said.
“It was wonderful.”
“Thanks for the lawyer, I’m sure he’ll be wonderful, too,” she said, and we both laughed. The electricity went out of the air. “He spoke of you once, you know. Devore.”
I looked at her in surprise. “I’m amazed he even knew who I was. Before this, I mean.”
“He knows, all right. He spoke of you with what I think was genuine affection.”
“You’re kidding. You must be.”
“I’m not. He said that your great-grandfather and his great-grandfather worked the same camps and were neighbors when they weren’t in the woods—I think he said not far from where Boyd’s Marina is now. “They shit in the same pit,’ is the way he put it. Charming, huh? He said he guessed that if a couple of loggers from the TR could produce millionaires, the system was working the way it was supposed to. “Even if it took three generations to do it,’ he said. At the time I took it as a veiled criticism of Lance.”
“It’s ridiculous, however he meant it,” I said. “My family is from the coast. Prout’s Neck. Other side of the state. My dad was a fisherman and so was his father before him. My great-grandfather, too. They trapped lobsters and threw nets, they didn’t cut trees.” All that was true, and yet my mind tried to fix on something. Some memory connected to what she was saying. Perhaps if I slept on it, it would come back to me.
“Could he have been talking about someone in your wife
’s family?”
“Nope.
There are Arlens in Maine—they’re a big family—but most are still in Massachusetts. They do all sorts of things now, but if you go back to the eighteen-eighties, the majority would have been quarrymen and stonecutters in the Malden-Lynn area. Devore was pulling your leg, Mattie.” But even then I suppose I knew he wasn’t. He might have gotten some part of the story wrong—even the sharpest guys begin to lose the edge of their recollection by the time they turn eighty-five—but Max Devore wasn’t much of a leg-puller. I had an image of unseen cables stretching beneath the surface of the earth here on the TR—stretching in all directions, unseen but very powerful.
My hand was resting on top of my car door, and now she touched it briefly. “Can I ask you one other question before you go? It’s stupid, I warn you.”
“Go ahead. Stupid questions are a specialty of mine.”
“Do you have any idea at all what that “Bartleby’ story is about?”
I wanted to laugh, but there was enough moonlight for me to see she was serious, and that I’d hurt her feelings if I did. She was a member of Lindy Briggs’s readers’ circle (where I had once spoken in the late eighties), probably the youngest by at least twenty years, and she was afraid of appearing stupid.
“I have to speak first next time,” she said, “and I’d like to give more than just a summary of the story so they know I’ve read it. I’ve thought about it until my head aches, and I just don’t see. I doubt if it’s one of those stories where everything comes magically clear in the last few pages, either. And I feel like I should see—that it’s right there in front of me.”
That made me think of the cables again—cables running in every direction, a subcutaneous webwork connecting people and places. You couldn’t see them, but you could feel them. Especially if you tried to get away.
Meanwhile Mattie was waiting, looking at me with hope and anxiety.
“Okay, listen up, school’s in session,” I said. “I am. Believe me.”
“Most critics think Huckleberry Finn is the first modern American novel, and that’s fair enough, but if’bartleby’ were a hundred pages longer, I think I’d put my money there. Do you know what a scrivener was?”
“A secretary?”
“That’s too grand. A copyist. Sort of like Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol Only Dickens gives Bob a past and a family life. Melville gives Bartleby neither. He’s the first existential character in American fiction, a guy with no ties… no ties to, you know…”
A couple of loggers who couldproduce millionaires. They shit in the samepit. “Mike?”
“What?”
“Are you okay?”
“Sure.” I focused my mind as best I could. “Bartleby is tied to life only by work. In that way he’s a twentieth-century American type, not much different from Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, or—in the dark version—Michael Corleone in The Godfather. But then Bartleby begins to question even work, the god of middle-class American males.”
She looked excited now, and I thought it was a shame she’d missed her last year of high school. For her and also for her teachers. “That’s why he starts saying “I prefer not to’?”
“Yes. Think of Bartleby as a… a hot-air balloon. Only one rope still tethers him to the earth, and that rope is his scrivening. We can measure the rot in that last rope by the steadily increasing number of things Bartleby prefers not to do. Finally the rope breaks and Bartleby floats away. It’s a goddam disturbing story, isn’t it?”
“One night I dreamed about him,” she said. “I opened the trailer door and there he was, sitting on the steps in his old black suit. Thin. Not much hair. I said, “Will you move, please? I have to go out and hang the clothes now.” And he said, “I prefer not to.” Yes, I guess you could call it disturbing.”
“Then it still works,” I said, and got into my car. “Call me. Tell me how it goes with Je, hn Storrow.”
“I will. And anything I can do to repay, just ask.” Just ask. How young did you have to be, how beautifully ignorant, to issue that kind of blank check? My window was open. I reached through it and squeezed her hand.
She squeezed back, and hard. “You miss your wife a lot, don’t you?” she said. “It shows?”
“Sometimes.” She was no longer squeezing, but she was still holding my hand. “When you were reading to Ki, you looked both happy and sad at the same time. I only saw her once, your wife, but I thought she was very beautiful.” I had been thinking about the touch of our hands, concentrating on that. Now I forgot about it entirely. “When did you see her? And where? Do you remember?” She smiled as if those were very silly questions. “I remember. It was at the ballfield, on the night I met my husband.” Very slowly I withdrew my hand from hers. So far as I knew, neither Jo nor I had been near TR-90 all that summer of ’94. . but what I knew was apparently wrong. Jo had been down on a Tuesday in early July. She had even gone to the softball game. “Are you sure it was Jo?” I asked. Mattie was looking off toward the road. It wasn’t my wife she was thinking about; I would have bet the house and lot on it—either house, either lot. It was Lance. Maybe that was good.
If she was thinking about him, she probably wouldn’t look too closely at me, and I didn’t think I had much control of my expression just then.
She might have seen more on my face than I wanted to show. “Yes,” she said. “I was standing with Jenna McCoy and Helen Geary—this was after Lance helped me with a keg of beer I got stuck in the mud and then asked if I was going for pizza with the rest of them after the game—and Jenna said, “Look, it’s Mrs. Noonan,’ and Helen said, “She’s the writer’s wife, Mattie, isn’t that a cool blouse?’ The blouse was all covered with blue roses.” I remembered it very well. Jo liked it because it was a joke—there are no blue roses, not in nature and not in cultivation.
Once when she was wearing it she had thrown her arms extravagantly around my neck, swooned her hips forward against mine, and cried that she was my blue rose and I must stroke her until she turned pink.
Remembering that hurt, and badly. “She was over on the third-base side, behind the chickenwire screen,” Mattie said, “with some guy who was wearing an old brown jacket with patches on the elbows. They were laughing together over something, and then she turned her head a little and looked right at me.” She was quiet for a moment, standing there beside my car in her red dress. She raised her hair off the back of her neck, held it, then let it drop again. “Right at me. Really seeing me.
And she had a look about her… she’d just been laughing but this look was sad, somehow. It was as if she knew me. Then the guy put his arm around her waist and they walked away.” Silence except for the crickets and the far-off drone of a truck. Mattie only stood there for a moment, as if dreaming with her eyes open, and then she felt something and looked back at me. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Except who was this guy with his arrfi around my wife?”
She laughed a little uncertainly. “Well I doubt if he was her boyfriend, you know. He was quite a bit older. Fifty, at least.” So what? I thought. I myself was forty, but that didn’t mean I had missed the way Mattie moved inside her dress, or lifted her hair from the nape of her neck. “I mean… you’re kidding, right?”
“I don’t really know. There’s a lot of things I don’t know these days, it seems. But the lady’s dead in any case, so how can it matter?” Mattie was looking distressed. “If I put my foot in something, Mike, I’m sorry.”
“Who was the man? Do you know?” She shook her head. “I thought he was a summer person—there was that feeling about him, maybe just because he was wearing a jacket on a hot summer evening—but if he was, he wasn’t staying at Warrington’s. I knew most of them.”
“And they walked off together?”
“Yes.” Sounding reluctant. “Toward the parking lot?”
“Yes.” More reluctant still. And this time she was lying. I knew it with a queer certainty that went far beyond
intuition; it was almost like mind-reading. I reached through the window and took her hand again. “You said if I could think of anything you could do to repay me, to just ask. I’m asking. Tell me the truth, Mattie.” She bit her lip, looking down at my hand lying over hers. Then she looked up at my face. “He was a burly guy. The old sportcoat made him look a little like a college professor, but he could have been a carpenter for all I know. His hair was black. He had a tan. They had a laugh together, a good one, and then she looked at me and the laugh went out of her face. After that he put an arm around her and they walked away.” She paused. “Not toward the parking lot, though. Toward The Street.”
The Street. From there they could have walked north along the edge of the lake until they came to Sara Laughs. And then? Who knew? “She never told me she came down here that summer,” I said. Mattie seemed to try several responses and find none of them to her liking. I gave her her hand back. It was time for me to go. In fact I had started to wish I’d left five minutes sooner. “Mike, I’m sure—”
“No,” I said. “You’re not.
Neither am I. But I loved her a lot and I’m going to try and let this go. It probably signifies nothing, and besides—what else can I do?
Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome.” Mattie looked so much like crying that I picked her hand up again and kissed the back of it. “I feel like a dope.”
“You’re not a dope,” I said. I gave her hand another kiss, then drove away. And that was my date, the first one in four years.
Driving home I thdught of an old saying about how one person can never truly know another. It’s easy to give that idea lip service, but it’s a jolt—as horrible and unexpected as severe air turbulence on a previously calm airline flight—to discover it’s a literal fact in one’s own life. I kept remembering our visit to a fertility doc after we’d been trying to make a baby for almost two years with no success. The doctor had told us I had a low sperm count—not disastrously low, but down enough to account for Jo’s failure to conceive. “If you want a kid, you’ll likely have one without any special help,” the doc had said.
