“Let me,” said Marion.
Sophia said, “I’m putting everything that’s in the icebox out. But I don’t think there’s enough bread.”
“I’ll go for bread,” said Win. A double howl rose up in the den. “In a minute,” said Win crisply and started toward the problem.
J, having watched his youngest stand up, went to the phone and spoke to Judge Carroll, who most courteously agreed to an appointment at his house for eight o’clock.
J went back into the family room, listening to this house, his daughters in the kitchen and the dining room, handmaidens to Sophia, his son’s voice busy with some fathering.
J felt worried, but happy. Okay, if anybody wanted to make something out of it, happiness was not a matter of the absence of problems. It was not being perfectly comfortable and never had been. What the devil had comfort got to do with it?
But he did not sit down in his comfortable chair; he veered toward the kitchen, where he told the feminine flock that he’d just as soon go for the bread, and waited to receive the news that the coffee was low and he had better bring some, but the cream (they felt) was adequate.
So … in his mind still testing all his threads for strength and tension … J opened the door to the garage and went through the short passage, not bothering with the lights.
J had no sooner left the kitchen when the front doorbell rang. The females looked at one another, but they could hear Win going to answer.
“Excuse me,” said the girl at the door in a breathless manner, “I’m Annette Woods. Could I please see Mr. Little?”
“I seem to have heard that name somewhere,” said the good-looking young man. “Come in. I’m his son, Win.”
She preceded him to the family room, which was empty.
Nanjo came out of the dining room. “Oh,” she said. “Hello.”
Sophia, in the kitchen, lifted her head and said sharply, “Who’s that?”
Amy heard a slate-colored crack, outside, in the evening. She stepped into the family room, thinking of Avery, and said, diverted at once, “Hey, you’re the girl I saw at the beach. With my father.” She raked Annette up and down with her smudged and beautiful eyes.
Annette seemed overwhelmed by the presence of all these young people. She said, “I just want one word with him. It’s awfully important or I wouldn’t …”
But now Sophia had come to see what was happening.
“Oh, Mrs. Little,” cried Annette in a kind of relief. “Please may I …”
“I’m afraid,” said Sophia coolly, “we can’t ask you to stay.”
“Oh, listen, please.” Annette began to pour out a tale. “Tony and I found them. There was a meeting, our side and their side. We told them it was all over. We swore to them. We offered any proof they’d want. We begged them to test us. But one of them is mad! He pretended to believe us, finally. But he took off with Goodrick and two others, and we’re afraid. He may think we were bluffing, just trying to trick him.…”
“Fancy,” said Sophia distantly.
“Tony’s outside, making sure. Where is Mr. Little? It would be terrible if now …”
“He’s just gone for a loaf of bread,” Sophia said.
“You … fool!” said Annette.
“Now, wait a minute!” said Win. He wasn’t having his mother called a fool. He was braced for his mother to blast off immediately, but Sophia did not.
She said, “Outside? Now?”
It was Marion who said sensibly, “I don’t think Dad’s gone yet. I haven’t heard the car go out.”
Because of his mother’s face, Win strode past her and began to cross the kitchen. Annette ran after him, caught up to him, said to him peremptorily, “I’ve got a gun. Get out of the way.”
He had the door to the garage open, and he blocked her with his shoulder and snatched the gun out of her hand. Sophia and the girls were all crowding into the kitchen.
Amy said, “I heard what could have been a gunshot.”
“Oh, J—” said Sophia faintly.
“Call the police,” said Win. “One of you. Hurry!”
“I will,” said Nanjo stoutly, and she ran.
Marion began to run; Win knew where she was going. To the Little kids, of course. She always would.
He started cautiously along the way to the garage. The strange girl was right behind him, twitching at his coattail.
“No lights,” she warned. “No lights.”
The garage door was up. Both cars were there. There was some light out on the driveway. There was some heap, some lumpish thing, some body out there on the concrete.
“Dad?” said Win. The whole world was falling, heavy, heavy on his shoulders. He could not move for the weight. Then a car started, somewhere in the neighborhood, and the spell was broken. Win went swiftly along the garage wall and into the open. The light was poor. All he could see was an outline of a fallen body. It was not his father’s. The strange girl came skittering past him, went down on her knees, and said, “Oh, no! Oh, Tony!”
Breath came sweeping into Win’s lungs; the garage light went on behind him. He turned. He saw, down on the floor, between the cars, another heap, another silent heap.
Amy, who had turned on the light, came along the rear wall to that slot, and he saw her freeze. The girl at his feet said, “Listen! Listen!”
Win turned his head; he had sensed his mother’s impending presence, and he did not want to see. There was a whispering and then a crashing of branches.
Gladstone Neeby burst out of the dividing shrubbery. “What’s going on?” he said. “Did somebody fire a shot? Who’s that?”
Then Nanjo’s young voice calling, “They’re coming. Should I call anybody else?”
“Call an ambulance, that’s a good kid,” said Amy strongly.
Win looked. His sister was standing, and as he looked, Amy put her folded arms on the roof of J’s car and her head down on her arms in an exhausted way.
Sophia was standing in the very center of the garage, and the wan light fell on her head and shoulders. She was looking down. Her right hand came up slowly, and she began to rub it against the bodice of her dress, as if to cleanse it.
Neeby said, “Oh, my God! Sophia!” He began to move.
Win said, “Get out of the way,” and began to run.
His mother’s head came up, and she took a step backward. The light made her face into a mask.
“He’s dead,” she said. “But where is J? Does anybody know where J is?”
A police car came. An ambulance came. Goodrick was DOA. The police searched all the shrubbery, the whole block, and came at last to say, “No. Nothing.”
Nobody knew where J was.
CHAPTER 30
Saturday Night
At 9 P.M. the Little kids were asleep in Nanjo’s room. Left in the family room were Sophia, her three children, Marion, the Neebys, and apart in the corner, Annette Woods and Tony Thees, whose damaged ear was bandaged under a white cap.
All the officials had gone away. A search was on. Over the city, over the state, men looked for J Middleton Little, “Male, Caucasian,” and so on.
Everyone had heard everything. They were beginning to go around again.
Gladstone Neeby said, “I saw a car, all right. Sedan, dark color; that’s just about all I can say. I heard a shot or what might be a shot. So I looked out. Didn’t seem to be anything going on out front. I looked out the side. Nothing. So I looked out the front again, and two men were helping (I thought) another man into the back. I couldn’t see who they were. They took off slow and easy. I let them go. I don’t know what I could have done. I damn well wish I’d done it.”
Susie said, “They’ll find him. They will. They’ll have to.” (Everybody knew this was desirable, but not necessarily so.)
Amy got up and said, “Well, I’ve got to go. I have a husband. But just once—tell us again, Mr. Thees?”
So Tony went over it again. How he had thought he heard feet scraping on the garage side of
the house, had sent Annette inside and drawn his gun, and gone very cautiously to see. He had seen, although very dimly, what he had taken to be two figures in the slot between the cars, deep within the garage. So he had gone softly and said softly, “Hold it!”
There had been silence and no movement, and he had taken one more step when there had come simultaneously a shot and a blow. He had fallen, banged his head (he thought, now), blacked out, and had heard no more. His own gun had not been fired. Whoever had sent a bullet through the flange of Tony’s right ear may have sent that same bullet into Barry Goodrick’s brain.
Tony was pretty well convinced that it had been this man they knew as Mr. Jones. There was a determined search on for him. Jones must soon be found, Tony said (knowing that this was desirable, but not necessarily so).
“What would he do with Pops?” Amy was blunt.
Tony said, “We don’t know.” (Amy’s eyes said, Never mind. I know.)
“Mother,” said Amy, “I have to go to Avery now.”
“I know you do, dear,” Sophia said.
So Amy left them. She said not a word to the girl, Annette, whose eyes, ruined now, all the paint smeared, watched her go.
Glad Neeby said, “And the damned meeting really was over, eh? And where, did you say?”
“A place called Poonacootamoowa,” Tony repeated patiently. “It’s an estate, a very rich man’s country place. Any librarian could have found out whose and where. It’s in the mountains, isolated. Pretty vulnerable from the air, you see.”
“And old J, he knew that,” Glad sighed. “But he thought he had seven seats to the moon. Seven, eh?”
“As long as it always was just a yarn,” said Susie Neeby angrily, “not to say a big fat lie—why didn’t you tell him he had enough to go around?”
“Ah, hush, Susie,” said Sophia. “They meant it to be cruel. But J wasn’t so foolish.”
The tenses of the verbs began to linger on the air. Glad said quickly, “So what did the big brains decide? The world is doomed or what?”
Tony said, “I guess it’s not that simple.”
Susie used her handkerchief.
Win got up and said, “Ma, will you be okay if Nanjo and I go and attend to that matter? Judge Carroll said he’d wait until nine thirty. And it’s nearly.”
“Of course. Yes, you’d better do that. But I … won’t go at this time.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Nanjo. “Win will help me.” She sprang up, ready.
“Listen, can’t I go, wherever it is?” Glad said.
“Thanks,” said Win, “but this is where I take over.”
“Why, sure,” said Susie brightly, “until your Dad gets back.”
Her husband touched her.
When Win and Nanjo had gone, Sophia said to her friends, “You don’t have to stay with me, Susie and Glad. I’ve been pretty thankful for you both … but now, I can’t keep on talking.”
“Come on, Susie,” said Glad Neeby promptly. “Just remember, Sophia, we’re right next door.”
“I’ll be here,” said Marion.
So there was another exodus. Neeby said sternly to Tony and Annette, “Hadn’t you better go someplace else, too?”
“In a minute,” Tony promised.
The Neebys left quickly, because Susie was absolutely going to cry.
Annette was crying. She wasn’t making any noise, but the tears were slipping out of her eye corners. “Oh, please,” she said to Sophia, quivering to be punished.
Sophia said, “I understand, I suppose, that you did according to your lights, but don’t ask any more of me right now. Who,” she flared up suddenly, “did you think he was anyway?” She turned her back.
“I think you’d just better go,” said Marion fiercely.
The phone rang.
“Shall I?” said Tony quickly, and Sophia, white and ready to fall, said, “Yes, quick!”
“This Thees?” the voice said. “Well, we got this fellow Jones, or whoever he is. And from the papers on him we’ve got the location of the plane and so forth. So that’s under control.”
Tony kept himself from saying Good. He said, “What about the car?”
“We got the car, too. Did I say Jones had a gun on him and maybe we had a hot suspect for the killing of Goodrick? Trouble is, right away they had to put him in a straitjacket and then he … I don’t know what … I guess he had like a stroke. He won’t be telling us much. Neither does the car. Somebody lost a little blood, not … uh … necessarily significant.”
“Where was the car?”
“In an alley. Industrial section. Practically deserted by night. No watchman saw or heard a damn thing.”
“The other two men?”
“No sign of them. We found this Jones, laughing like a maniac, on a bus bench on Wilshire Boulevard. Looks like his men dumped him there, drove off, and then ditched the car.”
Tony said nothing.
“And as for your friend Little,” the voice went on, “we haven’t got a thing. Don’t tell his wife, but the chances are they panicked and just dumped his body in some out of the way place. It figures. That Jones would murder as soon as pick his teeth, the shape he was in. Oh, we’ll find it. But I don’t think before morning. If then.”
Tony now gave over the phone to Sophia, who chose to hear for herself, and the voice gave her a somewhat less blunt account of these developments.
She hung up and stood—the tall woman, the aging woman, the agonized woman. Tony swallowed and said, “I wish you’d let me stay and take your calls.” (Cushion them, he meant.)
Sophia said, “No, I don’t want you around. I have many things to think about.” Color came into her face. Her dark eyes flashed to life with her temper. “Better things than how you two behaved.”
“We should have—” Tony began.
“I’ll tell you what you should have done,” Sophia cried, magnificent in anger. “You should have caught J in Chicago and told him the truth. What do you know about people like us? Did you think we had been such fools all our lives that you could fake up a foolish tale and tempt us to save our simple-minded selves … while you, in your wisdom, sneaked around behind our backs playing God? Oh, go away,” she cried. “It is not right for me to talk like this. It is not seemly,” said Sophia, and then quietly, “I think you had better leave me. I’ll take my own calls, thank you.”
Tony drove. His ear hurt like hell. Beside him Annette was carrying on, sobbing and twisting. “Oh, God,” he could hear her saying, “I want to go home. I’ve got no home. I only want to go home! Somewhere?”
Tony had glimpses of what she meant. Sure, maybe he’d like to go home, too. To the womb, that meant, of course. No problems, eh? Well, you can’t do that.
He wouldn’t have thought she’d crack up like this. He couldn’t—he hadn’t—he had never (he guessed) really wanted to tie himself to anybody. So better not think about the crazy idea of getting married, having a pack of kids, and making a home. That was nothing he’d quite had in mind. Who needs, he thought, to get so involved, so used to, so dependent on somebody else … that you got to go through suffering like that woman’s? Why should you let yourself in for that?
“Grow up,” he said aloud. “You can’t go home again.”
So copping out? Ah, but you don’t have to wonder if you’re selling your soul for comfort. All you have to do is say, “There is no soul.” And play it cool.
And miss the whole thing?
“Look, sweetheart,” he said after a while.
Marion, having checked on the Little kids once more, came out into the hall of the bedroom wing, glanced into the family room, drew back, and flattened herself against the wall. She could comfort the children, but she could help Sophia only by being here. So she waited in the middle. Being there was all.
Sophia, by herself in the family room, had crossed over to J’s chair. She hadn’t switched on his reading lamp. She had gone down on her knees, because she needed the sense of being closer to the ear
th. Her hands were clasped on the leather of his chair’s arm.
She was not weeping. If she was praying, she didn’t know it.
She knew she must take on the elders if J never came home. She must watch out for his father and catch that moment when he could no longer live alone. She must watch out for Marietta. And she must do for her children whatever she now could and accept what they would increasingly be doing for her. She must live out her span, taking all things in order.
Through the glass wall she could see some of her garden now that the moon was up. She thought, And if J is translated, now, into something like moonlight, I must try to think that it is beautiful? (Someday she would weep for her desolation, but not now.) Be brave? she mused. Remember him? That’s pretty bleak. But still it’s necessary. Because I mustn’t blame J! He wouldn’t leave the rest of us behind if he could help it. He wasn’t tired enough, not yet. J loved being alive. Nobody knew that so well as I. Did nobody else know it at all?
Forty miles away to the south, in the city, two police officers were speaking together in low voices.
“Can’t talk, hardly. Makes no sense. So a John Doe?”
“He dunno who he is. That’s what the doctor said. Look at the description. Average. Average. Scars? Naw! Nothing you can see. And no prints off of them hands.” The speaker glanced at the great puffs of bandages on the two hands of the man in the hospital bed. “And with his jaw broke and wired up, the teeth we don’t get at so good, either. He musta had a partial denture, they say, but it ain’t there now.”
“Nothing on him to help us. That hunk of stainless, or whatever it is, won’t do any good for us, eh?”
“Listen, we don’t even know it’s got anything to do with him. What is it, anyway? Some junky souvenir from a million gift shops. So it was lying there in the weeds. And so was he. So what? Forget it.”
“And who the hell threw him there—beat up, out of his head, and naked as the day? We got nothing on that, and we’re not goinna.”
“Well, put him on the list. Move him to Big County tomorrow. Maybe somebody will come looking, although how his own mother … C’mon. Better tell the nurse she can give him another shot now if she wants.”
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