by Dale Bailey
“Yeah,” she said.
“Emily—”
“The thing is, Henry, last time you were in town, you stirred up my whole life, and then you just”—she lifted her hands—“went away. I’m not sure I’m strong enough to handle that right now.”
“I’m not planning to go anywhere.”
“No, but you’re not planning to stick around either, are you?”
He said nothing.
“Are you?”
“I don’t know. I’m staying for a while, anyway. Until I figure out what happened to Dad.”
“And then?”
“And then—” He shrugged. “Then, we’ll see.”
She nodded.
“So what do you want me to do, Emily? I care about you. I want to spend time with you. Is that so awful?”
“No, it’s not so bad at all. But let’s don’t rush things, okay? Let’s just take it a day at a time.”
The music filled the silence, tenor sax snaking through an unpredictable groove.
What was it she had said to him? I got used to you running away. It was true, he knew. All his life he had been running: from his mother’s slow misery and death, from his father and his father’s pain, most of all perhaps from the dreams. From Emily, too, he supposed. And what had she done to deserve that?
Maybe you didn’t get what you deserved. Had Emily earned this life somehow, running beer in a run-down saloon, a mother crippled by emphysema, a father dead before she ever really knew him? Had his mother deserved her cancer, for that matter? That, more than anything else, had destroyed his faith in his father’s God. Maybe that same doubt had wormed away inside his father for all these years—had led him finally to the ice-cold consolation of the gun. Maybe he was a fool to consider any other possibility.
Across the bar, Emily was smiling.
“What?” he asked.
“You remember the first time you ever saw my house?”
Henry laughed.
He did remember—he didn’t think he would ever forget actually. December, the year his mother had died. He had been twelve, helping his father distribute the proceeds from the Christmas food drive. He had not known that the scabrous house in Crook’s Hollow had belonged to Emily Wood—had never thought of what her life might be like outside of school. But she had opened the door at his father’s knock, and Henry had stepped back in shock, the grocery sack slipping in his hands.
She blinked twice, said nothing.
Henry blinked back, squeezing the rough paper bag between his fingers. A small, hard-faced woman with a tight coil of gray hair stepped out of the darkness behind Emily.
“Can I help you?” she said.
“My name is Quincy Sleep, ma’am. I’m pastor over at the First Christian Church here in town.”
“We don’t take no charity, Reverend.” The woman had dropped a hand to Emily’s bone-thin shoulder, and Henry, following the motion with his eyes, inadvertently met Emily’s lucid gaze. He lowered his eyes, flushing. He still remembered how he had felt in that moment—dirty somehow, as if he had spied her naked when she didn’t know he was looking.
“Well, there’s no need to think of it like that, ma’am,” Quincy Sleep was saying. “Think of it as a gift—”
“We don’t take no charity.” The woman’s fingers had gone white-knuckled around Emily’s shoulder.
“Of course.” His father had glanced at the number by the door. “I see we have gotten the wrong address. But I do hope you’ll join us for services.” With a strained smile, he steered Henry away. At the end of the crumbling sidewalk Henry stole a last glance over his shoulder. The door was still open, Emily and her mother framed within it, and for a moment Emily’s eyes, fathomless and gray, had caught and held his own. An arc of recognition, electric, had jumped between them then, but she had said nothing. Nothing at all.
Remembering, Henry shook his head. “I felt awful.”
“You felt awful!” She laughed. “God I didn’t want to go to school the next Monday.”
“It’s funny, though,” he said. “That’s one of my clearest memories of my father.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah. We were in the car afterward, and I wanted to know why your mother wouldn’t take the groceries. I was building this model at the time—it was a ship, a battleship from World War II. It had about a million pieces.”
“A million.”
“At least.” He smiled. “Anyway, instead of answering me, he asked me why I wouldn’t let him help me with the ship.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t know. It just seemed important somehow that I do it on my own. And what he said was—” Henry lowered his voice, assumed a dead-serious demeanor. “‘Well, maybe that’s how that woman feels.’”
“He said it just like that?”
In the deep voice: “Just like that.”
They laughed together, and Henry felt something give way inside him, a hard knot of emotion he hadn’t known was there.
“But what I really remember,” he said, “is what he told me next.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He pulled the car over and then he looked at me and said, ‘There’s all kinds of food in the world, Henry. There’s the food you eat. But there’s also food for the mind—books and music, say—and there’s food for the spirit, too. Sometimes,’ he said, ‘food for the spirit is more important than regular food. You follow me?’” Henry turned the club soda in its circle. “The thing is, I didn’t follow him, not then.”
“And now?”
“I’m not sure, but I think, maybe, he meant that it’s not what happens to you that’s important—it’s how you react to it. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I think I do.”
Then nobody said anything at all. They sat there in the stillness of the bar with the light guttering over them, listening to Sonny Rollins blow the blues. After a while, she reached out and laid a hand over his.
“It’s not easy letting go, is it?” she said.
Chapter 9
Henry rested uneasily that night—what remained of it—his slumber broken by the old dream of the labyrinth, his tireless pursuer. Again he fled through nightmare corridors, dragging breath into constricted lungs; again, he turned that final corner to be confronted by his father’s ghost. Quincy Sleep stepped forward to embrace him and Henry stumbled away, remembering how that figure had touched him once before, the icy burns upon his cheek—
He sat up, sweating despite the chill, the covers clammy in his lap. Aquinas, curled at his feet, lifted his head and peered at him through inscrutable eyes, his tail thumping softly against the comforter. Then he tucked his head back between his paws and slept.
Henry slept again as well, a restless, thrashing sleep haunted by dreams of a different order: Emily, her face remote and unforgiving. If you leave, the dream Emily told him, don’t come back. He woke unrested and late—toward midday—with the words still echoing in his mind. He almost reached for the phone right then, wanting to confirm the sense he had walked away with the night before—the sense that they had reached an accommodation, that there was hope yet. Instead, he got up and dressed quickly.
He spent the afternoon in town, tangled in his father’s estate—lawyers and bankers and bureaucrats, like vultures, all of them hungry for a little taste of the flesh. He got home after dark to find a message from Emily on the machine. She had to work tonight, but maybe they could spend the day together tomorrow.
He dozed in front of the television and woke disoriented to the doorbell. His first thought was Emily, that she had managed to get off work early. But when he opened the door, a tall, bearish man stood on the porch.
“Hello, Mr. Sleep,” the man said. “My name is Benjamin Strange, from down the Observer? I left you a message. Maybe you got it?”
“I got it. You have any idea what time it is?”
The man—in the dim light of the porch, Henry thought he might be sixtyish—g
lanced at his wrist. “Just after ten, by my watch.”
“It’s late. Just like the first time you called.”
“I have my reasons for that, Mr. Sleep.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to hear them, thanks all the same. Good night.”
He started to swing the door shut. Strange caught it with one heavy hand. He held it, not really applying pressure, and said, “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve your hostility, but you should do yourself a favor and listen to me. That’s all I ask, a half hour of your time.”
“I don’t have any interest in feeding the local gossip.”
“Your father was a prominent man in this town. People are going to talk.”
“Let them talk, then. I have nothing to say to you.”
“Maybe I have something to say to you, Mr. Sleep. Have you thought of that?” The hand fell away. “Shut me out if you wish. But you should know that the day before your father died, I spoke with him by telephone. I don’t know why he committed suicide, but the nature of our conversation leads me to believe that maybe—” Strange hesitated. “The nature of our conversation leads me to believe that maybe the official story isn’t the true story.”
For a moment the two of them stood there on either side of the threshold, the old man and the January night on one side, the young man and the warm house on the other. Then Strange took a deep breath. Henry heard congestion rattling deep in his lungs, a phlegmy spasm that give way to a torrent of coughs, raw and moist and painful sounding.
“You okay?” Henry asked.
Strange held up one hand as if to say, Sure, I’m fine, no problem, but another fusillade of coughs doubled him over.
Henry sighed and opened the door wide. “You better come inside,” he said.
“Is that better?”
Benjamin Strange took another sip of water. He nodded, too worn out to speak, perhaps. His breath still came in ragged gasps, and his long, time-scored face was pale. Henry watched him from across the kitchen counter, in the pitiless glare of the overhead fluorescent. Everything about Strange was simultaneously massive and somehow dwindled: his enormous blunt hands, knotted around the water glass; his heavy head and luxuriant thatch of iron-colored hair; his thick-featured, intelligent face. But the hands were liver-spotted and the seamed flesh of his broad head clung to his skull, making him haggard, cadaverous. The lips trembled as he lifted the water to his mouth, and after he replaced it softly on the bar, his hands trembled as he rubbed his eyes. Tired eyes, Henry thought. Watery, gray, exhausted eyes, sunken under a luxuriant sprawl of eyebrows.
How old was he? Not sixty. Closer to seventy maybe. The barrage of coughs had dissolved Henry’s hostility for the moment; now he wanted merely to move the man along.
“Can I get you anything else?” he asked.
Strange—“Call me Ben,” he had managed to gasp a moment ago, and now Henry mentally corrected himself—Ben—nodded.
“Scotch,” he said.
“You’re joking, right?”
“There’s got to be some scotch here. Your dad drink?”
“Moderately.”
“Well, he probably has some scotch in the house.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Ben laughed. “It’s a little late to rethink lifestyle issues, I’m afraid.”
“All right, then.” Henry pushed his stool back, went into the dining room, and returned with a bottle. He got a tumbler from the cabinet, filled it with ice, and thrust both glass and bottle across the counter to Ben. “Bourbon will have to do. Anything else?”
Ben’s breath was coming easier now. “Please.”
“What’s that?”
Ben dug through the pockets of the woolen overcoat he had tossed across the other stool; he retrieved a pack of Camels and a brass lighter and stacked them on the Formica. “May I smoke?”
“If you think it’s wise.”
“Wisdom doesn’t have a thing to do with it,” he grunted. He placed a cigarette between his lips, lit it, and took a long drag.
“I’ll want an ashtray,” he said. “And you’ll want a glass. By the time I finish talking, I have a feeling you’re going to need a drink, too.”
“I know it’s late, Mr. Sleep. And I know it was late when I called the other night. But I wanted to be certain the police were gone. I wanted to make sure we could talk privately.”
“If you have information about my father’s death, the police are the people you should be talking to.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I trust you’ve met Sheriff Crawford?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you notice anything odd about him? About the kind of things he wanted to know?”
Henry thought about his talk with Harold Crawford that night, the flicker of anger he had seen far down in the other man’s eyes when he pressed him on the police report.
“It struck me that he was more interested in what my father might have said to me than who might have broken into the house.”
Ben took a final drag off his cigarette and stubbed it out. “Strangely enough,” he said, “Harold Crawford and I had a similar conversation not long after your father’s body turned up. The very same day, in fact. He showed up in my office with an interest in what your father might have said to me when we talked on the phone Tuesday morning. ‘How do you know I talked to him on Tuesday?’ I asked. He told me they pulled the phone records after they found the body.” He paused and stared at Henry, as if he had imparted information of great significance.
“I don’t get it,” Henry said.
“I’ve been a reporter for a long time, Mr. Sleep—”
“Henry.”
Ben nodded, smiled. “Henry it is. I grew up in the Run, Henry, but I worked a good chunk of my career—thirty years—in the Midwest. Milwaukee. Chicago. I’m fifty-seven years old—”
Henry’s surprise must have shown in his face, for Ben broke off, letting the sentence dissolve in a mirthless laugh. “That’s right, fifty-seven. You might call this”—he waved his arms, a gesture that seemed to encompass the entire town—“a kind of premature retirement. For some of those years I worked the crime beat.”
“So?”
“So a cop doesn’t just haul phone records out of his hat. He has to get an order from a judge, has to take that order to the phone company, usually has to cool his heels while the phone company pulls the records for him.”
“So Crawford knew about the phone call before he should have.”
“That’s right.”
Henry thought about it for a minute. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Dad might have mentioned it to Asa or to his secretary down at the church. He might have written it in his daybook for that matter.”
“Then why would Crawford lie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s nothing at all.”
“Or maybe my father didn’t commit suicide. Maybe Harold Crawford is mixed up in it somehow.”
Ben leaned forward. “It’s worth thinking about, wouldn’t you say?”
Aquinas sprang to the counter between them. Henry glanced away, breaking the hold of Ben’s avid gaze.
“What do you want from me then?”
“Your help for starters. You might be able to answer some questions for me.”
“And in return?”
“In return, I’ll answer some of yours.”
“The thing is, I don’t know anything.”
“Maybe you know more than you think.”
“Such as?”
“Well, background for one. Tell me about your father.”
“What’s to tell?”
“I mean what kind of man was he? Was he the kind of guy that puts a gun in his mouth?”
Henry watched Ben scratch behind Aquinas’s ears while he thought about that. The cat collapsed bonelessly and rolled on his back. Closing his eyes, he stretched, a drugged purr emanating from his throat and chest.
Was his father the kind of man who would kill himself?
The thing Henry remembered best about his father—the core of his personality, and maybe the thing that had finally driven them apart—was his iron self-control. Composed, rational, unshakable—Henry could think of a half dozen adjectives to describe Quincy Sleep, but the words he associated with suicide—hysterical, despairing, depressed—just didn’t fit. Henry remembered how he had hated him for the way he had conducted himself at his wife’s funeral and in the hard months afterward. The flood waters receded and the grass grew over Lily Sleep’s grave and Quincy Sleep had never talked about it with his son. Not once.
He’d taken refuge in silence and faith.
Or so Henry had always supposed.
“I don’t think so,” he said now. “When my mom died, Dad weathered some rough waters without blinking an eye. There was some talk then. We had a bad time.”
“What kind of talk?”
Henry made a dismissive gesture. “It’s not important. The thing is, he could be a son of a bitch, but he was tough. I don’t think he would have killed himself.”
“I’ve talked to some people. They tend to concur with your view,” Ben said. “On Tuesday morning, the day your father died, he called his secretary at the church. Called in sick. Penny Kohler places that call at about eight thirty. He called me at ten thirty-seven that same morning. I remember that because I had just glanced out the window at the bank clock across the street. They had predicted snow and I wanted to see the temperature. Your dad sounded excited, almost manic, but he didn’t sound suicidal.”
“What did he say?”
“He wouldn’t talk about it over the phone, but he said he thought he had a story for me. A big story.”
Henry ran his palm along Aquinas’s slick fur. “Those were his words?”
“Something like that.”
“Did you set up the meeting?”
“We did. He was supposed to come by the next morning. I tried to get him to tell me more, to give me some idea what he had, but he wouldn’t. He said he wasn’t sure yet and he needed to go through it again. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.”
