“It could,” said J. “Any day. Any night.”
“Is she all right?” asked Susie of Sophia, who was eyeing her husband intently.
“Oh, I think so,” said Sophia soothingly. “I don’t know what happened. Nothing, I bet. She’s been talking about moving into some religiously inclined Home. It could be a cult of some sort. I’ll have to investigate and see if they’ve been upsetting her.”
“Ah,” said Susie sympathetically.
Sophia was noticing that Nanjo had not come into the house. Still, that was natural. There were always farewell ceremonies, as Sophia knew. Nanjo wasn’t alone out there, where nobody was.
Out there a man standing with Tony Thees beside Tony’s car was saying, “Goodrick’s gone with the wind.”
“And Little is okay?” said Tony tensely.
“So far. Playing bridge. They got company, see. Maybe Goodrick was waiting for them to go home. I guess whatever Goodrick had in mind, when the fat lady came, she must have scared hell out of him. Little and his friend took a look around. We had to lie low. But believe me, nobody else is around now.”
Tony stood with his hands in his pockets and watched the moon coming up.
At last he said, “I want a man on every corner of the house. I don’t want a fly to get in there.”
“The girl’s still out someplace.”
“What girl?”
“I guess it’s the daughter.”
“Well, let her in,” said Tony.
He thought, So when the bridge game breaks up and the company goes home, that still leaves four people in the house, and three of them female and, naturally, noisy. He could see no course without its danger. So let time waste? That might still be the safest way. (Although an airplane can get you anywhere on earth in just one day. If you know where to go.)
But he smiled to himself. Oh, they wouldn’t get it in time. Whatever happened would take time. A pitched battle on the grounds of the house would take time, too, if that’s what they wanted.
Now that the moon was up Nanjo, whose eyes ached from their fight for sight, could see only the moon-made shadow of the church roof against the downhill wall.
She crept on all fours out of her hiding place because she just could not stand it anymore. He was probably gone. He must be gone, as a dream is banished. But Cal, the gardener, was still there, crumpled on a slant on the concrete steps with his head down, moonlight on his boots, face in shadow, and still. It didn’t take long for Nanjo to know what his stillness was.
She didn’t scream.
She sprang up the steps, avoiding him with nimble feet. Once on the sidewalk she started up the hill again. She did not walk too fast. She couldn’t. Her heart hurt too terribly. She was filthy. She knew that her knees were bleeding. Her dress was torn. She had to get home, had to get home, had to get back, get back to being Nancy Jo Little. Had to get back to where she had been.
And she could not tell, would never tell anybody, ever, about this terrible detour. Nobody would ever have to know.
At the next cross street there was, mercifully, a bus stop. And a bus coming. The bus was not very full. The sleepy people didn’t pay much attention to the young girl who got on quietly, a cool mantle of control around her shoulders, a mien that said, Don’t look at me. Don’t worry about me. I know what I’m doing. I do this all the time.
Nanjo went to the very back and took off her ruined stockings and spit on one and wiped at her knees. She spit on it again and scrubbed at her face, took out her compact, and powdered herself well.
Luck! This bus would take her within half a mile of her house. She wouldn’t stop at Debby’s for her sweater, no. She’d just get in. She’d get in somehow, back to her own room, safe to her old self.
It wasn’t her fault what had happened to that man. (It was—Oh, God—terrible! But it wasn’t her fault!) And she felt bad enough without having to hear that she shouldn’t have done this or that. They’d be wild! She’d rather take it by herself. She could take it. She just would, that’s all.
Since Sophia had pleaded a natural lack of interest in any more cards, refreshments were served, and then the Neebys finally went home. They trotted down the walk, calling pleasantries, and J, leaving the door open behind him, stepped out on the stoop to look at the moonlit night and the peace and quiet of his neighborhood.
He felt grateful for Glad Neeby. Grateful for that man, his friend, his kind. But J was ashamed that his friend had heard him, even while clowning, putting his own-kind-only in fanciful control. That was the human temptation, all right. But J was civilized. He knew that he didn’t hold the whole thing up. Legions did that. And of those legions, legions held up (each man) more than J. And legions, outside the pattern of earn and pay, held up (for all J knew) something of value. Hadn’t he known at the very beginning that seven seats to salvation were worse than none at all?
He jumped when Tony spoke up quietly from the shadows. “Don’t worry, Mr. Little. They’ve gone. We’ll be keeping watch over you and your family.”
Sophia called from within, “J?”
He turned and, without even answering Tony, went blindly into his cave. Over me and mine? he thought. That’s not enough. That’s not good enough. That won’t save me!
Sophia said, “Isn’t there a car out there? I thought I heard Nanjo a long time ago.”
“No,” he said, “no.”
“Where the dickens is she, then? I know they get to yakking, and she’ll be mortified if I phone. But I don’t like this.”
“She’s being watched over,” said J.
“Watched!”
“She’s mine.” J went slowly into the family room to his chair.
Sophia came slowly after him. “J, you don’t go along with my theory, then? You do think there was somebody?”
He didn’t answer.
“You look like it’s the end of the world,” said Sophia angrily. “Listen, J, please! How can I help if I don’t know?”
“That’s the trouble,” he said.
“J, what can I do?”
He looked up at her. “Listen?” he said. “I’m sorry about my word of honor and all that, but I can’t stand it anymore if you’re not in it with me.”
“Here I am,” she said, feeling immediately calm and strong. “Let’s go into our room.”
It was in her mind that Nanjo would be coming in, and this wasn’t a child’s business. She left one light and followed her husband’s dragging feet, feeling not frightened but filled with joy.
So J sat on the edge of his bed and told her in a low voice the whole thing from the very beginning.
Outside, from time to time, a bird called peacefully.
Elsewhere Goodrick was saying, “Can’t do it by night. Neighbors too close. Street too quiet. House too full of people. You stir up that wasp’s nest, middle of the night … Shoop. Shoop. What can he know, anyway? Rescues. Barbecues.” Goodrick grated his teeth.
“You make no sense,” said Mr. Jones coldly. “What is your thought?”
“I make more sense than any of them,” Goodrick muttered. He took his thumb from his mouth and said coldly, “The practical thing is to get him tomorrow when he leaves alone.”
“You may be right,” said Mr. Jones. “Especially if, as you say, you saw no sign of anyone on guard?” Mr. Jones tried to face facts without crying.
“Nothing,” lied Goodrick.
The crazy old woman had some kind of power? Goodrick didn’t understand it, but a curse was a curse, and death he didn’t yearn for.
Sophia was, as J had anticipated, furious.
“Well, of all the runarounds! They’re using you, J! Whatever they think they’re doing, they’ve got no business putting you on such a spot! Sssh.…”
There was a padding of feet along the hall outside their door.
“Nanjo?” called Sophia.
“Night, Mom,” said their daughter. “Sorry it’s so late.”
“Well, get to bed,” her mother said, relieved th
at Nanjo was safely home, but with most of her mind on J, his possible danger, on her own outrage, on all this nonsense! Seven seats to the moon!
Marietta, who was not asleep, heard Nanjo come creeping in. She lay still, expecting light, but none came. In the dark Nanjo crept out again, going into the bathroom.
In a little while Nanjo came creeping back, still in the dark, and Marietta heard her bed receive her weight. In a moment she could hear the muffled sound of weeping. But such weeping!
She sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. In the other bed there was the hump in the covers, a tousled shock of hair, and a sudden, very deep, rejecting silence.
Marietta struggled to her feet and went her way to the bathroom. She didn’t know what to do. She had been told, she remembered, she had been told to get out. In the mirror her own blue eyes dismayed her. She closed them, but then the lids flew up, and she turned to the hamper, whose lid was not quite fitting down. She bent to adjust it and there were some stockings lying on top, within, torn and bloodied. There was a cotton dress, its skirt torn and dirty. Skirt? Torn? Dirty?
Evil! Evil! Sin and terror! Secret! Dirt and darkness!
With a silent scream Marietta held her own throat and felt the pulse pounding.
In a while she stepped as softly as she could into Nanjo’s room. She clicked the lamp out. No sound came from the girl in the other bed. No sound. No loving comfort asked for? None to be given. Marietta tweaked at the quilt on the top of her bed and, dragging it behind her, crept out of the room and into J’s den. Alone, but not alone—where her private angel would be comfort, for he knew that only loving kindness dwelt in Marietta’s heart. Only. Only.
Nanjo lay trembling. She must remember to wash her stockings and whisk her dress into better hiding early tomorrow. Her mother wouldn’t go into that bathroom, at least not early. Nanjo would have to work around her grandmother, but Marietta was easy to fool. Nanjo would be “washing her hair.”
All traces would be erased. Nobody would know. There was proof (in her sweater) of where Nanjo had been. Debby would lie for her peer, of course. Cary didn’t even know. He didn’t care, she thought. He let her walk away by herself in that awful part of town. Didn’t care, never would, didn’t know how to care … Oh, why had she ever …
Her knees were stinging and smarting. She’d wear capri’s tomorrow. Thank God it was Saturday.
Oh, what if Cal had not fallen?
She was shivering uncontrollably. Oh, she was glad her grandmother had got out of here. She couldn’t stand her grandmother. She didn’t know that she could stand anything, anymore!
Well, she’d have to. Couldn’t tell Mom and Daddy. She’d lied to them. Dated Cary, after all. No. But oh … Should never have got into his car. Oh, what a fool.…
Oh, God, Cal, the gardener, was dead! He would never move again. Or do anything! HE WAS DEAD!
Down in the tavern things were getting rough, and somebody called the cops.
Glad Neeby, wiggling in the freedom of his pajamas, said, “The old lady’s getting senile, I guess.”
“Well,” yawned Susie, “she never had far to go, you know. Oh, they’ve got problems.”
“J was talking funny talk tonight, at that,” Glad murmured, vaguely distressed.
“Good old Mrs. Arriola could have something this time,” Susie went on. “Oh, well, maybe it’s only Nanjo’s got herself pregnant. Egads, that kid! You should have seen her in that dress. Whoo! Whoo! Or, of course, old J could have had some kind of fling with that platinum blonde in Chicago, and Sophia’s going to live it down.”
“Such is life, eh?” said Glad heavily. “You take old J, though.…”
“Listen,” said Susie. “I think the world of those people. I’d do anything in the world! But if they don’t tell you, what can you do?” She crashed down on her bed.
Gladstone Neeby crawled between his earned white sheets and put his head on his own clean pillow. “Not a thing,” he mourned. “Well, when you come down to it, what could old J do for me?”
“Why should he do anything?” said his wife. “What’s the matter with you?”
“You never know,” said Neeby. “We lead a sheltered life,” he added. “We’re kind of out of it, actually.”
“What is out?” said Susie indignantly. “We’re human!”
Her husband didn’t deny it. He thought his spindly, spiky, spunky little wife was about as human as they come. He’d take care, naturally. Oh, he worried, sometimes. Often.
Sophia held J’s head to her breast and said resolutely, “Nothing’s happened yet. All right, then. So we’ll go about our business. But if anybody or anything bothers us, for one second, anymore, we’ll just call the police.”
J thought, Ah, wouldn’t it be nice, wouldn’t it be loverly if this was a world where everybody could go about his business, do his work, raise his children, enjoy his friends, and the dew on the rose, and all things dear and mild, and if anything bothered, just call the police, who would come bringing justice and mercy.
But that kind of world it is not and never was. He wondered if it ever would be. He was wondering with his eyes wide open, his ear listening to Sophia’s heart. He felt drained. He knew, of course, that he wouldn’t like such a world. Man had to keep on making rules, trying to get along with himself, but justice was rough and mercy uncertain. And had to be. You better not clamp down absolutely. There had to be room. You didn’t want to take the zing out of it. God knows who man is! Man doesn’t know who he is, yet.
J thought sleepily that (if he knew how) he’d like to remind God that He had a nice dramatic thing going in this corner of the universe—a human life. “Listen,” he argued, “I don’t ask for the moon.”
“I don’t want to be Noah, Sophia,” he murmured. “I haven’t got what it takes to do what he did.”
Sophia said, “What a terrible thing that was to ask a man to do.”
CHAPTER 27
Saturday Morning
About five o’clock on Saturday morning Goodrick’s phone rang. “Listen,” a man said, “when do I get any relief? Seventeen hours is a hell of a stretch.”
“Aw, go home,” said Goodrick. “Jones took you off long ago. You’re watching nothing. I checked, and she’s checked out.”
“So what else is new?” said the man indignantly. “Sure, she checked out. I’m back of her motel right now. Nobody told me I was took off.”
“Is that so?” said Goodrick thoughtfully.
The morning light was still shut away from Nanjo’s room when Sophia went in, put her hand on the mound that was her daughter, and said, “Wake up, Nanjo. I want to know what happened last night? Why”—Sophia raced right on—“did your grandmother move into the den? Did you fight with her again? Did you say something to hurt her feelings?”
Nanjo heaved. “I did not!” she said shrilly. “I just sneaked in, trying not to wake her up, but she got up, and she went. I didn’t say one single word. Not one word! She didn’t say anything, either. What’s she saying now?”
“She seems to be leaving us,” said Sophia.
“Well, I don’t know anything about it.” Nanjo burrowed deeper into the bedcovers until only the top of her head was showing. “Gosh, Mother, it’s Saturday! Am I supposed to get up and say good-bye or what?”
“No,” said Sophia. “No, I don’t think so.”
When she had gone, Nanjo’s heart kept on thumping so hard she thought the bed must be shaking. Scared about to death when her mother had wanted to know what happened last night. Nanjo had only just escaped blurting out the whole thing, had been saved by the time it takes to draw a breath. Only that!
Sophia found that the taxi had come, the man was loading Marietta’s suitcases in. J was out there on the sidewalk. Sophia didn’t think this was wise, but before she could say so, her mother appeared, encumbered by small bags and bundles but moving rather swiftly. Sophia received a kiss and a tear in passing, but as J helped Marietta into the cab, he received (Sophia noticed) a m
ore lingering embrace.
So there went Marietta, and Sophia was glad of it.
First thing this morning Marietta had announced that she was, after all, going back to her boardinghouse.
Sophia had been shocked! Marietta’s O. G. A. had never, that she remembered, changed his mind before.
Her mother had gone on to say that they had been so kind, and they were so very good to her, but she could not—she just knew that she must not—stay on! She would suffer out the waiting until her funds resumed, when she would definitely move into the Retreat because, she had said tearfully, “It’s the only place … the only place for me.”
That was when Sophia had telephoned the woman there and given her mother a hundred dollars.
It had come to her that there her mother would be safe at least from some worldly angels of darkness.
But on Sophia’s mind, at the moment, was not her mother’s departure, but danger to J, who still stood out there on the lawn, seeming to brood over the view of the valley that swam in the morning haze below.
Sophia forcefully hailed him inside.
They went back to the dinette for another cup of coffee. It was good to be alone together. (Let Nanjo sleep on. Nanjo was safe.)
Sophia said that there was probably no real danger, but at least her mother was safe for a week. And J wondered aloud, with a blink of alarm, if “they” had been bothering his father.
Sophia said she doubted that. She said that whatever was bothering his father, J was going to stay right here, snug at home. There was no use flying in the face of advice (even if you didn’t quite believe in the danger). J was not to go anywhere at all. Not today and not tomorrow. And on Monday Sophia would see.
So J, feeling as if he had a tiger beside him, agreed that he would telephone his father later on. Perhaps a moral dilemma could be dealt with over the phone. Meantime, he had better get out in the yard and do something about that cockeyed tree. Trim the rest of it to balance and dispose of the lopped branches in some orderly fashion.
Sophia agreed that he might be permitted to do so, since she would be keeping an eye on.
They had Annette tied down in such a manner that she could not break away from her many connections to the machine. Goodrick presided over the polygraph as a competent witch might preside over her daily cauldron, quite sure of the ingredients, quite sure of the results. No need to cackle or carry on.
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