Twisting the Rope

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  The man raised his heavy square face and stared at Long, seeming to ask what this dapper and very dark Asian had to do with such a child, but he only shook his head and went back to wrapping salmon steaks in newspaper. His hands were not bloody, but stained with printer’s ink.

  When Long returned there were four people in the motel room, for Pádraig had returned and was slouched in his accustomed place by the table. There was a smell of incense in the air.

  The all looked at Long with a painful hope, and he looked only at Martha. “I don’t think she went that way.”

  “She is not by the motel,” stated Pádraig. “I looked everywhere. Even in the dustbins.”

  Long went into the bathroom and washed his face. He wished he could wash his lungs as well, for they felt both filthy and abused. The desire for a cup of strong tea swept over him, but he ignored it. There was no time.

  “Did you call the police?” he asked, coming back into the bedroom. Its paint and polyester, white, green, and lilac colored, hit him as though he had never seen them before.

  “Of course,” said Elizabeth, who still sat at the bureau by the telephone.

  “Sergeant Anderson was out,” her mother murmured. “Because of the other missing kid—the one from last night. But they sent Officer Scherer again.”

  “The other missing child?”

  Martha shook her head, forestalling either hope or new worry. “Not like this. They think it’s a custody kind of thing. Institutionalized kid stolen by the parents who originally gave it up and can’t have it back. Or I may have it wrong. He told me about it before.

  “About that and some purse snatchings.”

  Long looked at her closely and in silence, as though her incomplete thoughts would communicate themselves if he were patient.

  “It was the string-bean cowboy with the Tevis Cup buckle who came,” added Elizabeth in a voice drained of feeling. “He said they would all look for her.”

  Long was tired and the sand had made his shoes uncomfortable. He took them off one at a time and emptied them into the wastebasket. “I’m sure they will,” he said, and added, “I’m going out again.”

  “Where?” It was Elizabeth who asked.

  “I don’t know. To the mall, perhaps. Perhaps only to run in circles, uselessly. But I feel impelled to movement.”

  Martha raised her foot, which was now sausagelike both in shape and color. She cursed using words Elizabeth hadn’t believed her mother knew.

  Elizabeth herself made fists in her pockets. “I… I feel that way, too, but I’m terrified to leave the phone.”

  “I don’t think you should,” said Long. The afternoon was now advanced enough that the shadow of the wall darkened the window, and Elizabeth’s face was full of haggard shadows. “When the police find her, she will surely be tired and upset and then it will be important that you are near.”

  She bit down on her own band and looked away.

  “I’m going with you,” said Pádraig, almost belligerently.

  Long opened his mouth to say he would rather not have the company, but the very young Irishman stood in front of him, hands in pockets and head bulled out in front of his shoulders, ready for anything.

  Was this the boy who had begun the day with a shock, continued by getting drunk, fell asleep, woke with a hangover, and ran to the Santa Cruz jail to rescue him? Heavens, but youth had a magic to it. Long decided he’d be a fool to turn down such aid. Pádraig might have to carry him home.

  Teddy Poznan had not said a word since Long’s arrival. Now he uncoiled himself from his yogic seat on the carpet. A moxybustion stick fell from his shirt pocket and broke. “I have a little idea of my own,” he said. “I’ll go out and give it a go.”

  “What’s that?” Elizabeth’s question was harsh.

  Martha sighed. “I can’t imagine it’s anything that could do Marty any harm, Elizabeth.”

  “I’m going to knock on doors.” Teddy moved his shoulders in circles and took a deep breath alternately through each nostril. “I’m going to go from door to door and ask every person in the neighborhood if he or she has seen a pretty little yellow-haired girl.

  “I’ll probably get arrested, but maybe I’ll just find Marty, seated in front of someone’s television, happy as a clam.”

  “Rotting her brain,” murmured Elizabeth, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “Even if they haven’t seen her,” added Martha, “you’d have the perfect opportunity to tell them about the values of acupressure. Or a mucus-free diet. Or even colonic cleansing!”

  Ted’s face reflected massive resignation as he followed the other two out the door.

  The sea wind had blown the sky gray, and Long kept both his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Pádraig didn’t seem to notice the sudden chill, not even when his hair snapped around his eyes.

  “Did you ask the woman at the bus stop?” Long asked him, standing as yet undecided on the street in front of the motel.

  Pádraig tucked his round head between his sizable shoulders. “I didn’t talk to anybody,” he said, making his sudden shift to shyness.

  She was heavy and dressed with orchids on polyester. She hadn’t seen a child.

  Long looked left and then right. On the one side was Chestnut Street, blank and busy. Down the block on the right side was the south end of the mall.

  How could a child ignore the appeal of the blossoming red eucalyptus in its rows, or the crazy brick walkways? Long turned right, dragging Pádraig in his wake.

  At the corner the wind hit them, and it was wet. “It’s starting to drizzle,” said Long in disbelief.

  Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin made a triumphant noise. “At last the drought has ended!”

  Long turned and stared at him. Though they were almost of a height, he managed to tower over Pádraig with arched neck. “What drought?”

  Pádraig took a step backward and bumped into the cowboy guitarist of the mall, who was making a dart for a shop doorway. The guitarist was protecting his instrument from the rain with his fringed jacket. He had drops beading his droopy moustache.

  Long turned the encounter to use, and to his satisfaction the guitarist admitted to having seen a little girl with yellow hair about an hour previous. All alone. He mentioned particularly the daisy-rimmed sunglasses, which gave her a Lolita sort of look.”

  Long didn’t approve of the allusion. Pádraig didn’t understand it. They went along the mall in the rain.

  Pacific Mall in the rain had a very different look to it. Less tropical. The bricks on the street shone with a more conservative, cityish rust, and the red fluff of blossoms was battered to the sidewalks.

  “Look at them,” said Pádraig, pointing quite rudely at a cluster of pedestrians packed into the alcove of a jewelry store. “They might melt, they think.”

  “They might,” answered Long, without looking. “Rain in June is an aberration. A disgusting one.”

  “Hah!” Pádraig hopped in place at Long’s side. “In this heat it’s nothing but a good face-washing.” indeed, the water on his face seemed to brighten Pádraig’s color and his mood until he seemed to Long much like the rowdy boy who had begun the tour in Massachusetts, eight weeks (only eight weeks?) before.

  “My mother had a cow that did like Marty—would run away. She ran off every day, and you know where she’d go?”

  “Is it relevant?” asked Long in return, wiping his face with both hands.

  Pádraig opened his mouth at the unfamiliar-sounding word, but decided to let it go. “She would go into Ballyferriter and stand in front of the hostelry. There she would stand and drop her little piles against the window. The barman would be wild!”

  Long said nothing. The rain came down with force.

  “It wasn’t anything to eat that she got there, because no one would feed her. And before we got the telephone in, he’d have to call next door and a lad would come over with the message she was out and in front of the bar. Then it was me to come and get her. Me and the
dog.”

  The air was suddenly filled with the smell of coffee, heavy enough to sting the nose. Mayland Long was not a coffee drinker, but he was not immune to the invitation of the smell, associated as it was with sweet pastries and other foods he did like. Searching about him through water-sparkled lashes, he found the establishment whence the odor came. It had an especially good door alcove, containing three backpackers in semi-Indian garb and a hammer dulcimer player.

  He stood without and asked his question, this time adding the sunglasses to his description.

  “I saw her,” said the woman with the dulcimer. “I won’t forget her in a hurry either. The little thing stood right in front of me quiet as a mouse all the time I was playing, and when I was done she said, ‘Planxty Irwin,’ clear as a bell.”

  “And was it ‘Planxty Irwin,’ then, that you were playing?” asked Pádraig, grinning.

  “No. It was ‘Arkansas Traveler.’ But still…” Her gray-blue glance sharpened. “’scuse me, but are you Pat Sullivan?”

  Pádraig admitted as much, lackadaisically. He was made to wonder how many of that faceless audience last night had been musicians. (And how many knew how he’d made a fool of himself with the seannós.) He read a surmise in this girl’s eyes, and predicted she was about to suggest he get his instrument. Or to go somewhere. He couldn’t, of course, and as a matter of fact, the idea struck him as boring. But he always made such a mess of turning people down. Pádraig sighed.

  “I thought so,” said the dulcimer player, doing a sort of juggle of her knobbed sticks. “I saw you race once, in Brittany. The Tiger Cat, wasn’t it?

  “I have a little boat out here,” she continued, casually. “Fourteen foot. Nothing competitive, but…”

  Long had to drag him away.

  Someone had seen Marty drift off to the east. Another lounger was sure she went back down the mall. The dulcimer player herself hadn’t noticed. At last Long and Ó Súilleabháin stood uncertain at the end of the mall and looked around them.

  On one side of the street was a bakery. On the other was the coffee emporium. To the north, across a bleak and busy intersection, was the Santa Cruz clock tower, which was of red brick with an open arch underneath. A fountain, protected by the clock itself from the rain, spurted in lively fashion within the arch.

  “She’d have to!” said Pádraig. “Any páiste would have to. I think I have to myself.” He led the way across to the tower, oblivious to the honking traffic. Long followed, his face set into worry at the thought that Marty might have breasted this same mindless metal flow.

  It was such a pretty little fountain he was forced to agree with Pádraig. A child could not see this place without coming to it. He felt a surge of anger that the builders had put the thing here: a bait of bright water and cobalt tile in the center of a murderous trap.

  Pádraig, still being a páiste, sat on the edge of the fountain and waited to see what would draw him on next. But the next step was not so clear.

  “She didn’t go back or we’d have found her,” said Long, leaning against the bricks. “And left and right are only streams of traffic. I venture to suggest she went on.” He looked up in surprise, for it had abruptly stopped raining.

  On the far curb was a telephone kiosk. “We should call in,” Long said, and felt in his pockets for change. There was only his elegantly thin checkbook and his money clip, containing a large number of twenties. At the lintless bottom of the pocket were three pennies.

  “I have ten-cent pieces,” said Pádraig, digging out a jingling handful. “My mother told me always to have silver in a strange place.”

  Long took two dimes. “Your mother told you correctly,” he admitted, and out of a new feeling for the woman he had never met, he added, “What did she ever do about the cow?”

  “She sold it and bought a used washing machine,” said Pádraig as Long picked up the receiver.

  For a moment the thought that he was about to find that Marty was home and it was all over was so overpowering that Long could not dial. He had not realized he had become so attached to the child. It made him almost unable to act. But his face showed nothing and he blew his nose discreetly as his other hand punched out the now-familiar number.

  The conversation was short.

  “Nothing,” Long said to Pádraig, who didn’t need to be told.

  From then on the way became a matter of guesswork, but Mr. Long was a very careful guesser. On the streets north of the mall there were fewer street people, and the pedestrians going to have vacuum cleaners fixed or to buy bagged almonds were not likely to remember the presence of a small solitary child, passing an hour or a half hour before.

  But the rain had left puddles in the sidewalk, and out of one of them ran a track of footprints of the proper size. These might have been left by Marty, and if so, she was not too far ahead of them. Long decided they were meaningful, and he and Pádraig continued north.

  It rained again and stopped again, for the wind was blowing new weather in from the southwest. Pádraig’s heavy black hair, straight as an Indian’s, straight as Long’s Chinese hair, collected diamond beads. So did his eyelashes, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  Long felt chilled and hot together, as they came out of River Street and came to the wide swath of Highway 1.

  The traffic was heavy and fast; it was difficult to see pavement in between the cars. He opened his mouth to say, “No, she can’t have gone this way,” but the words didn’t come out.

  But Pádraig heard what was not said. “Terrible place. But there’s a light, isn’t there?”

  Yes, there was a traffic light, and pedestrian boxes too. Would a three-year-old be strong enough to push the steel button, and responsible enough to go through the work of it? Long found he was shaking his head.

  “Either she did or she didn’t,” Pádraig was shouting into his ear, for the roar of traffic was formidable. “And if she didn’t, then it must be that she walked along the highway here.”

  “That’s almost worse,” said Long, glowering as though it were somehow Ó Súilleabháin’s fault.

  “I know it,” answered Pádraig, on the intake of breath. His small nose wrinkled at the stink of exhaust and he stepped out into the street. “We can go see, at least.”

  Long yanked him back as he pushed the recalcitrant steel button that controlled the pedestrian box. “We, being adults, can do it safely.”

  “Naw, but it’s such a long wait!” But Pádraig waited, scowling, Long’s hand heavy on his shoulder.

  Both men glanced furtively at the gray pavement as they passed across the highway. No blood in the damp road.

  On the other side they discovered another little cause for optimism, for the same muddy little footprints led in and out of the puddles leading away.

  “Perhaps it is not Marty,” murmured Long, “but it is the same foot we’ve been following.”

  Pádraig leaped into the air making fists above his head. He gave a good imitation of a hunting horn. Mr. Long, though he himself was heartened by the discovery, viewed this without enthusiasm. “My granddaughter is not a fox or a hare, Ó Súilleabháin.” But Pádraig had already dashed ahead.

  Youth. Mr. Long did not feel very well, and this out-of-season rain had left him worse. There was something he remembered, about being sick and in an unexpected California rain. As he walked on, he breathed with effort and tried to remember.

  There it was: the memory. Sick and bleeding and cold, under the scrub trees of a house lot, while two vulgar characters made ready to kill Martha Macnamara. One of the worst times of his extended life. One of the best, too, in retrospect.

  Surely a head cold could be endured… .

  Certainly it could, in exchange for Marty’s being found safe. His granddaughter, Long had called her, and it was doubtful he remembered at the moment that she was not, in fact, his blood relation. She was little and perfect and full of trust in him; Long was her Chinese daddo: ready to destroy whatever creature came between them to do
her harm.

  But of course there was nowhere to focus his anger, for Marty had simply wandered off by herself. There was no villain in this piece at all. Perhaps he could vent his rage on “Judy,” the imaginary playmate she could not forget, but that would not be much to the purpose.

  They were passing the garden of the Salz Tannery, and the sour, dry smell of leather hit their lungs. Then Long felt a much harsher assault: an assault of cold that seemed to have malice of its own, stronger than the warmth of anger. He gasped, tripped on the sidewalk, and staggered into Pádraig.

  The young man’s mouth hung open, and his blue eyes squinted in confusion. “Fog?” he said, his word leaving a cloud of mist in the air. He shook his head like a dog. “Isn’t. No fog. But like yesterday, on the beach. It was bad like this.”

  Long heard him without understanding. “Listen,” he whispered, and the two stood huddled on the rainy sidewalk, while the traffic going by made scissor sounds. After only five seconds, the cold went away.

  “Did you hear anything, a chara?” asked Long. “Like pipes? Or a sea gull?” Pádraig shook his head.

  “Nevertheless,” said Long. “Nevertheless.” He strode forward, his face set in hard lines.

  “And to think I said there was no villain.”

  Martha was looking out the motel room window, which had a view of the parking lot, the enclosed patch of dry grass beyond it, and the backyard of a row house beyond that. There was a tricycle made of pink plastic upended on a tiny square of green, and a small boy with an orange popsicle on the concrete stoop. Martha felt a rush of envy that made her knees weak.

  It was not that she wanted to be that boy with his frozen confection (she hated artificial orange flavor) any more than she wanted to be a pink tricycle. She only wanted to be unconcerned.

  Óchón, agus mochón Ó!

  The dead grass in the little field sparkled with drops from the unaccountable rain. So dry was the grass that the rain could not soften it, nor the sea wind ruffle it. How awkward a play the two young people had made out of that dead grass; the old play of courtship. Which is just about the best play in life and yet—she considered Elen and Pádraig—sometimes a mistake… .