“Am I fearful?” He grinned sourly, beneath the glasses. “What the hell would I be afraid of?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “and I wondered. You seemed frightened, not just upset, when I left the other night. What had I done?”
“I was tired. Looking at all those pictures from the old days, your father and Hub and all the rest, Carver and Rita, it made me remember the old days. Wait till you’re old, young man, and you’ll see, you’ll feel the terrible loneliness that comes with snapshots from long ago … The Dorian Gray effect, seeing yourself and your chums, young and alive, knowing full well that you’re old and half dead now or just plain dead …”
“Who’s dead? You guys all still know each other—”
“Tim,” he reminded me sourly, “Carver, Rita …”
“Rita?”
“The cook, housekeeper—”
“She’s dead? You know that?”
He looked startled for a moment, then the sluggishness returned, the malicious grin. I wondered if he were wholly sane; he seemed fine at first, then wandered off the road.
“What are you jumping on that for? She’s as dead for me as Carver is—who knows if either one of them is dead? I don’t see them, so as far as I’m concerned, they’re dead as the birdbath, you get me?” He smirked, working his mouth, shaking his head at my stupidity. “Don’t jump on me like that. You sound like General Goode at his most … military.”
I leaned forward on the oilcloth.
“What went on up there at the lodge?” I asked quietly, driven by my own Devil, curiosity, whatever name it went by. The inability to leave well enough alone. “You must have seen it or been informed—did it get a little rough? Ole said it got a little raw.”
He guffawed. “Ole. He knows nothing! He says it got a little raw …” He shook peculiarly, rumbling, wetness seeping like rheum in the eyes of an old dog.
“Well, forget Ole, then,” I pressed on. “But for you as a priest, wasn’t it difficult for you to see what was going on?”
“Are you—you, of all people, not even a Catholic! Are you presuming to tell me my responsibilities as a priest? Should I have turned my back on them and their pursuits, left them to it? Or was my responsibility to remain at hand, to act as a reminder, a governor? No simpleminded questions, please!” He took the cigar butt from out of the bear’s face and snapped a kitchen match on a ragged thumbnail, puffing until the flame burned through squashed ash to tobacco. It smelled like my worst fears.
“What was going on? Why did Carver’s name scare everybody?”
“I don’t know what you mean … what was going on?”
“The women, the gambling?”
“You lascivious fellow,” he said reprovingly, as if the misbehavior were mine. He was slipping away from me, candor evaporating with the fog.
“But I keep wondering why Maxvill gets to you guys the way he does … What could you feel so guilty about? You, a priest …”
He got out of the booth and beckoned me to follow him, out the back door onto his narrow patio, where the old lawn furniture was rusting beneath paint blisters. The finch was perched on the chipped birdbath. Everything about Father Boyle’s house and life seemed chipped, damaged, ready for the junk heap. He picked up a rake, poked at the long wet grass, a soggy brown paper bag.
“The priesthood,” he rumbled, gravelly in his chest, “two views of that calling. Either a priest, familiar with sin as he is, should be particularly prey to guilt, on intimate terms with all of his own sins however small … or, leading a good and moral and helpful life, he should be, in his saintly wisdom, impervious to it. The problem,” he wheezed, gasping, “the problem is that he this priest of ours, is human and vulnerable and frail. At best, not an easy position. In any case, what evidence do you have that I have a damn thing to be guilty about, anyway?” He stopped, puffing, and looked up the hill. “Fog’s going. There’s the Witches’ Tower.”
“What do you call it?”
“Witches’ Tower, that’s what everybody calls it. Please, don’t ask me, why, Mr. Cavanaugh. It’s just what they call it.”
“So you don’t feel guilty.”
“I don’t think about guilt any more than I have to. But you have to realize that the boys in the club were just getting away from it all, a little misbehavior’s no cause for lifelong guilt. They never got out of control …”
“Your presence was a restraining influence, I suppose?”
“You might say so.”
“Sort of the club chaplain, so to speak?”
“So to speak.”
“Which brings us back to Carver Maxvill, doesn’t it?”
“You, perhaps. Not me.”
“But what was it about him? What did he do?”
Boyle, beyond my reach now, laughed chummily. “Now, talking about Maxvill was what got me into trouble in the first place, wasn’t it?” He pushed the rake into a mat of grasses and trash along the bottom of the fence, pulled outward, fetching up a tin can. He wheezed with the effort.
“You mentioned Rita—your housekeeper. Was she the one Maxvill got entangled with? Maybe a little jealousy among the old lads?” My mind was overworked; for an instant it all seemed plausible.
“How should I remember? Really? Child’s play.” He poked with the rake and a bunny leaped from the mound of sweet, wet grass, ran across our path and under a bush. “How should I remember who might have made a pass at the cook, a thing like that? I think her morals were, perhaps, in question, but it was so long ago and what difference could it possibly make to anyone? It gives me a headache.”
“So it was a long time ago,” I said. “What’s thirty, forty years, in the scheme of things? A wink in the eye of time, right? Could he still be alive? Maxvill?”
“Could? What a word. Of course, he could … he could also be the Christ of the Bottomless Pit, the Wrath of the Lamb, or the Paraclete of Kavourka. But I don’t think so … I think he’s probably dead.”
“If he’s dead,” I said, “do you think he’s in Heaven, Father?”
He stopped his pacing and leaned on the rake, a grin spreading across his Irish face. He didn’t look as if he were absolutely all there: He wore the expression of a man who had opted out; he wore it like a new suit and he was getting used to the fit.
“No, I shouldn’t think he is,” he said calmly. “I sometimes wonder if anybody gets to Heaven, Mr. Cavanaugh.”
I never saw Father Boyle again.
9
THE HAZE BURNED OFF BY noon and it was a warm day with a white glowing sky. The Porsche behaved itself admirably and the new tape deck played some tapes I’d put together myself; the result was that I listened to movie sound tracks all the way—A Man and a Woman, Picnic, The Quiller Memorandum. Wonderful driving music, the green fields swishing past, memories of Kim Novak dancing toward William Holden on that long-ago picnic evening from my youth. I could still see her, body rhythmically twisting, hands clapping slowly, beating out the passing of the years.
The wind whipped at me, the music was loud, and moving fast made time stand still. My mind flickered in and out among the shadows of my past, noding to my mother, to a young Archie, to Anne, and finally settling on Kim. I went over the previous evening as closely as I could, trying to see it all happening, remembering not so much what she said but exactly how she’d looked as she talked, the gestures and mannerisms and the sound of her voice. I felt a childish euphoria, as much the next day as when I’d been gone from her a matter of minutes; I knew it was childish. I’d always been one to rush in, taking more for granted then I ought, assuming incorrectly that others felt about me as I felt about them. I’d been hurt, of course, but like the Bourbon kings, I learned nothing from the wounds. I considered Kim on two levels, intuitively and rationally, and there was never the slightest doubt as to which would predominate. I tried to pretend there was. I tried to remember how convoluted her life had been, how others saw her; helplessly, I knew how I felt about her … or at least how I wante
d to feel about her. I should have spent some time wondering how she felt about me. But that would have been out of character. One flaw among many was that I’d lived quite a long time and learned nothing about the bargains you strike with life. My dogged belief was that you could make it all turn out the way you wanted it.
North of Duluth, having dropped down to the lake’s valley, the temperature fell off twenty degrees and you began to feel the wilderness around you instead of people. Off to your right, Lake Superior chopped itself to pieces, wicked and icy in the wind, and the woods and raw fields and taconite plants made something ominous of the landward side. The sun dimmed and the white glow blurred, grew murky and gray and plaintive. The little towns hung on the rock ledge that disappeared abruptly into the lake. The streets were potholed and the children in the playgrounds wore quilted jackets already and kicked at footballs. The cars at the chipped curbs were muddy and old and sagged on lifeless springs and roadside taverns looked like polished log cabins with red neon signs. A big mining town, with dreadful black pyramids crisscrossed by catwalks, looked prosperous for an instant but you whisked by too fast, saw the ramshackle quality behind the Veneer of flashy motels and executives’ homes. It wasn’t deep woods and it wasn’t city; it was that dirty, gnawed half thing that scuttled nervously in between, looting and despoiling the land at one end; spewing out jobs and salaries at the other end. Hobson’s choice.
I pushed the Porsche on through the afternoon, burrowing deeper into the gray, like a man in a tunnel, feeling the north tightening around me, collapsing in on me. I’d never felt it quite so strongly before, never felt the intimidation. It could have been my imagination; it could have been the peculiar, muffled quality the day had taken on. It could have been my mission.
Matt Munro was singing the song from The Quitter Memorandum, a sorrowful song, and I’d heard it a thousand times. I joined him in a fervent duet as I swept past the black pyramids and out along the lake once again. I was following the long angling drive up the lake and my eyes kept being pulled toward the whitecaps, the sailboats thrashing recklessly among them, ignoring danger, because summer was almost over; time was running out.
I reached Grande Rouge about three o’clock and pulled over by a green strip of parkland which lay between the main street, which was the highway, and the rocky beach. The wind was cold and the only people in sight were wandering around the gas pumps at the Standard station. Two brokendown, wheelless cars from the late forties lay like ancient ruins beside the station and a mud-caked station wagon was being serviced at the pump.
Named for a towering outcropping of reddish rock just behind and a hundred feet above the town, Grande Rouge struck me as a lousy place to start a vacation but it was the weather. In the sunshine or decked out in shimmering snow, it would have a certain charm. Gray with a faint mist slipping quietly in off the lake didn’t do it justice.
I left the car where it was and walked across the highway to the Chat and Chew Cafe, a white frame building with a picture window and the obligatory red neon sign. There was a counter along one wall, tables in the middle, and booths along the other wall, a series of coat hooks on the wall, an authentic Wurlitzer freestanding jukebox, a glassed-in case of pie, cake, and doughnuts, and crockery three-quarters of an inch thick. It smelled like hot coffee and fresh baking and maybe Grande Rouge wasn’t so bad after all. I sat down on a stool and had coffee and a piece of apple pie with a moist, rich crust that crumbled and fell apart at the touch of a fork.
The counterwoman, who had the proprietary air of an owner, leaned on the stainless-steel counter across from me and wiped her hands on a clean towel. She was about fifty and had a nice, tight hairdo from Ruth’s next door and smelled of a little too much face powder. She looked at me and grinned out of the corner of her mouth. “Busy, busy, busy,” she said.
“Well, you can’t expect much from the middle of the afternoon,” I said.
“Summer’s gone, that’s the reason,” she said. “Just up and left about ten days ago, been cold ever since. Hasn’t been above sixty. It’ll be this way—slow and gettin’ colder—all through the winter. Makes you want to hibernate. Or go south.” She made a little clicking sound. “Am I right, Jack?”
A man of about her age, wearing a blue policeman’s windbreaker, heavy dark-blue whipcord pants, and a revolver strapped into a holster on his hip, moved among the tables, coming toward us. He had sad eyes and a wrinkled, weatherbeaten face. He was carrying about forty pounds too much gut. “How’s that, Dolly?”
“Summer’s gone. We’re in for a long winter.”
We all looked out the picture window. There was nothing moving but the surface of the lake. A few drops of rain spattered hurriedly on the glass.
“ ’Bout ten days ago,” Jack said, rubbing his chin, “got colder’n a witch’s tit. Summer just shut down.”
“Just what I said,” she said.
“Where you headed?” The policeman was looking down at me.
“Here,” I said. “Right near here, anyway.”
He sat down two stools away. “Might as well have a cup of coffee.” He sighed and unzipped the windbreaker. “Sure ain’t no crime wave to stop. And Dolly’s coffee beats watchin’ Leo pump gas over at the station. Quiet little town,” he added, watching the steam rise off the coffee as she poured it. “Hell,” he said conversationally, “there ain’t nothing near Grande Rouge, not so far as I can tell anyways.” He looked up expectantly, his eyes on me. “That apple pie pretty good, is it?” I nodded. “You sure you’re in the right town?” He chuckled.
“Oh, I’m sure,” I said. “But I’ve got to drive back up into the hills a few miles. My dad and some friends used to have a cabin, a lodge actually, pretty good size, back up in the woods. They used to come up here and fish, hunt … They tell me it’s still there and it still belongs to them. I thought I’d like to see it.”
“Sure, I remember those fellas, huntin’ and fishin’, fellas, used to come up from the Cities. Hell, back in the thirties and forties, when my dad was the police hereabouts—you say your dad was one of ’em, eh?”
“For a while anyway. Then he moved away.”
“So now you’re taking a little vacation in the old lodge.” He shoveled some pie into his mouth, dribbling crumbs on the counter.
“Quite a bunch they were,” Dolly said. “Used to come into town for bait, have some beers, raise a little hell. Pretty damn near tore up Helen Little Feather’s … ah … house of ill repute one night, or so I heard. That’s, oh, fifty miles north of here, but news travels fast, I always say.”
“Well, Helen had to expect that from time to time, catering to these city boys out on the loose in the woods. That and the damned woodchoppers. …” Jack grinned at me. “Your daddy’s bunch knew how to have a good time, that’s something.”
“I don’t think he was in on that,” I said.
“No offense, mister,” Dolly said quickly. “Just remembering the old days and all. Long time ago, thirty, forty years anyways.”
“I wasn’t taking offense,” I said while she filled my cup again. “As a matter of fact, I’d like to hear anything you can remember about that group of men. I’m a writer and I’d like to do a piece, a story, on what it was like up here in the old days …”
“Nostalgia,” Dolly said firmly. “It’s what they call nostalgia, Jack, real big now, they say.”
“Anything like neuralgia?” Jack said, guffawing suddenly. “My God, Dolly, you don’t have to tell me what nostalgia is. I’m the town cop, not the town retard!”
“Do you remember much about it?” I asked. The coffee maker hissed. A Regulator wall clock ticked beneath the pressed-tin ceiling. It was very peaceful. I ate another forkful of apple pie. “Anything?”
“Well, I’d have to sit and recollect a bit,” Dolly said, eyes far away, as if she’d already begun.
“Course, there was that business about the housekeeper, or whatever the devil she was—Rita, Rita Hook, that was her name. Old Ted H
ook’s wife.” Jack peered into the bottom of his coffee cup, stirring the remains. “I was about eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty, sort of helping out my dad, and there was this funny business out at the lodge.” He rubbed his chin again. “I couldn’t make head nor tail out of it, my dad couldn’t neither, hell, nobody could.” He lapsed into silence.
“Well, what was it? Don’t leave me hanging …” I was forcing a smile.
“Not real clear what did happen out there, y’see. But Ted Hook’s wife, Rita, went out there one winter night and damned if she never came back! You remember that, Dolly?”
“She ran off with somebody,” Dolly said matter-of-factly without bothering to look up from a huge stainless steel kettle. “Married to old Ted, him an invalid, she just got herself all excited and ran off with some fella … Plain as day.”
“Nobody from Grande Rouge, though,” Jack said. “Nobody else showed up missing.”
“But what’s her running off got to do with the lodge?”
“I said what.” Jack grinned. “She went out there one night, dead o’winter, to check the water pipes or something, some bit of maintenance, told old Ted she’d be home later or come back in the morning if she had to stay overnight … You understand I’m just getting this off the top of my head, mister, and I may not have some of it quite right …”
“The place was deserted, then? Nobody from the club, the men, none of them were there?”
“Not so far as I know. That spaghetti for supper, Dolly?”
“Yep, sure is. She leaned back and shifted the kettle onto an electric grid which glowed red. “She never came back. Ted Hook never heard another word from her. Never one word. Just left him.”
“Left him pretty well fixed.” Jack was lighting a cigar with a Zippo lighter which had a leaping-fish emblem stuck on the side. He exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke, engulfing his head. “Old Ted built a motel with a roadhouse, been living off it ever since—”
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 18
