The Scream

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  The Scream

  Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  The Scream

  Sally had called him a "mother's boy" when he wanted to leave the party at eleven. It hurt and angered him, but what angered him most was that he hadn't left right then. He stayed on, as though that was going to change her feelings toward him. She'd turned her attention to guys he didn't even know and didn't think she did. She said she'd hitch a ride in one of the other cars. Now he was really late. He drove up the ravine trail furiously, scattering stones and gravel, ripping through the bramble. Midnight wasn't late for that gang, even on a school night, even though they'd lost the beer to the cops who had intercepted them on the way down. He had an old-fashioned mother who pretended she wasn't a single parent. Sometimes she told people her husband was away on business. But sometimes, when she and David were alone, she would call him the man of the house and say how much she depended on him.

  As soon as he cleared the park drive he opened up the Chevy. He'd got in the habit of worrying about his mother when he didn't get home on time. This angered him, too. What he worried about was her worrying about him, and it made him feel tied up. Or down. He kept flooring the accelerator until he turned off the highway onto a two-way shortcut via the old County Road.

  He thought of Sally and the guy who'd been trying to make out with her when David took off. He was a wimp. David hated him. Sally seemed to like wimps. She had an overload of energy and breasts like ice cream cones. He hit top speed again. Nobody used the County Road except the locals. With not a car in sight, he reached into his breast pocket and fished out the orange packet. He rolled down the window thinking, One more for the road: His joke on himself. He had yet to use one of the damn things in a real situation, yet to suggest to Sally or any other woman that he had one in his pocket. He threw it out against the wind and felt immediately that it might have blown back into the car. He glanced around. In less than a breath of time he turned back to the road. A car, dead ahead, no lights, had stopped half on the pavement, half on the shoulder. He swerved across the middle line, then, starting to careen, he let the wheel take control. The Chevy swung back and he saw the woman coming around from in front of the parked car. He saw her scream. Didn't hear it. Her face, the mouth wide, seemed to zoom at him. He pulled the car away from her and fought to control it by acceleration. The woman flung herself against her car, sandwiched between it and the Chevy when he passed. He got command, his hands frozen around the steering wheel. He was faint with fear, but he hadn't hit her. He was sure of it. He would have heard something, a thump, a noise, something, if he had. He was sure of it. He did not stop.

  * * *

  "Davie, is that you? Are you just getting in?"

  "I've been downstairs for a while," he lied. He squeezed the words through a dry, tight throat.

  "Then you should have finished your studies before you went out. "I know." At her bedroom door he said, "Good night, Mother."

  "I need a kiss," she said, and when he brushed her forehead with his lips, "Now I'll be able to sleep."

  He drew the door almost closed. The cat wriggled through and followed him down the hall. It wove itself between his legs in the bathroom and then rubbed against him when he sat on the edge of his bed to take off his sneakers. As soon as he removed one, the cat jumped it and worried its head into the toe.

  "Allie, it stinks!" He buried his face in the crook of his arm. "Like me."

  He woke up before he finished the Our Father. In the next second the spiraling plane would have hit the ground. He lay, abruptly wide awake, knowing what he had dreamt, and wondered why he had not been scared. He'd felt calm and oblivious to the other passengers, who were also about to die. "Forgive us our trespasses…" Suddenly he remembered the face he'd kept seeing while he lay in bed last night, unable to fall asleep, the scream he couldn't hear. If he looked at the wall now he would see it again. If he closed his eyes he would see it. He wrenched himself out of bed. Every bone in his body ached. Every muscle was taut.

  His mother called to him from downstairs wanting to know if he was up. She had called him before and he had fallen back into sleep, into the dream. He leaned over the banister and shouted down that he'd be ready in ten minutes. In the shower he told himself that he must go back to where it happened. What good would it do now? He couldn't have hurt her. She'd have been scared, fainted maybe. But how could he not have hurt her? With him going at that speed, the wind could have pulled her to him. But he'd have known it, felt it. And if he had, wouldn't he have stopped? He had not stopped. That was why he had to go back.

  David resembled his mother. He was slight, with straight, tawny hair, very blue eyes. The sharp, delicate features made him feel that he looked like a choir boy. He'd got in the habit of pulling down the corners of his mouth. Tough guy, his mother said of it once, which was exactly what he wanted. The one thing he didn't want now was his mother getting a good look at his bloodshot eyes. "I had an awful dream before I woke up," he said. It might explain or distract.

  She sat, her chin in her hand, and watched him pour milk shakily into his cornflakes, not seeming to notice anything different in him from other mornings. She was dressed for work, waiting for her ride to arrive any minute. "Want to sort it out?" she said.

  "I was going down in a plane crash. There were lots of people screaming, but I wasn't scared." He'd made up the screaming part. He couldn't remember them screaming.

  "What else do you remember? Little things," she coaxed. She liked to interpret his dreams for him. She had done it since he was a little kid, a game he kind of liked.

  Now he wished he hadn't mentioned this one. "I woke up before we crashed."

  "If you weren't scared, what were your feelings?"

  He shrugged. "Like, philosophical. I said the Our Father." He pushed away from the table. "Mom, I got to go. Professor Joseph always calls first on the kids who come in at the last minute. We call him Sneaky Joe."

  "You miss your father. That's what your dream's about."

  "Yeah." He got up. The cornflakes barely touched, he put the dish on the floor for the cat.

  "Why don't you write and tell him that, Davie?"

  Again he shrugged.

  "I know you could tell him things you don't tell me," his mother said.

  "Okay, Mom. I'll do that." He was desperate to get away from her. He couldn't even manage the usual peck on the cheek.

  "Are you going to be all right to drive?' she called after him.

  "Why not?' Each day he drove the twenty miles to St. Mary's College, picking up two classmates on the way.

  "You're jittery. You're working too hard. You ought not to work late at night. Your sleep's important, Davie. You're still growing."

  "Yes, Mother. Yes!" If only her ride would come. He wanted to call his passengers and tell them they had to get to school on their own that morning. It would commit him to going back there.

  She called after him: "I have pot roast in the Crock-Pot if you'd like to bring someone home to dinner."

  He was shocked at the scratches on the fender and the door when he first saw the car in daylight. It must have happened eoine down or coming up from the water's edge. Going down, he'd been concentrating on Sally's hand getting nearer and nearer his thigh. And then the sheriffs patrol had stopped the three cars and confiscated the beer. The cops had made them get out of the cars, and they asked each one if they had any joints or other dope. They hadn't searched anybody. Sally said afterward that if the deputy had laid a finger on her, her father would have had his badge by morning. Some of the other boys went to St. Marys, too, which had turned coeducational recently. Like him, they were day students, but they were upperclassmen. One of the deputies had flashed his torch i
n David's face and then asked to see his driver's license. He couldn't believe David was a college student. Sally tittered. She didn't say it then, but later-mother's boy. He took a chamois to the scratches and turned up the local station on the radio. The only traffic incident reported was a three-car crash on the interstate. He'd bet no one ran away from that one.

  The macadam was still silvery from the overnight frost when he turned into County Road. Tire tracks crisscrossed and then disappeared where the sun's first rays skimmed the surface. The temptation to turn back was getting to him. He made himself go on, one road sign to the next. He reached the underpass beneath the suburban railway. Then he lost his nerve. He turned around beneath the arch and headed for school.

  It was too late to go to his first class. In the library he asked at the desk if he could see the County Sentinel, not yet on the shelf. The librarian wanted to know if he had a hot number. The lottery. "Look, you never know," David said.

  He went through the paper column by column. "Crime Watch": "The sheriff's patrol reported no arrests, significant crimes, or serious accidents." He was disappointed. Crazy, but that was how he felt. He returned the paper and headed for his second class. It struck him then: The accident on the interstate had not been reported either. It was too soon. But not for it to have been on the radio. Could that mean that nothing very serious had happened on County Road? But something had happened. Suppose he never found out. He didn't think he'd ever forget it. But say that woman wasn't supposed to be where she was, it was a stolen car maybe, and say that by a miracle she wasn't hurt, or suppose there was someone in the car she wasn't supposed to be with, say someone dragged her into the car afterward. Maybe she was hurt. Or dead. If she had banged her head, say, on her own car, he wouldn't have heard that, would he? Just because he hadn't heard anything didn't mean nothing happened. All morning he kept turning over in his mind different possibilities, knowing that only one of them, and maybe none, was so. His imagination would not let go. He was such a good liar, why couldn't he lie to himself? He ought to keep track of the lies he told. A priest once said to him about confession, "Don't simply pick a number as though it's a lottery." Which was exactly what he used to do.

  Lying was his big problem from when he was a little kid. It always surprised him that people, his mother, for example, took for granted he was telling the truth. Or did they pretend, too? Pretend they believed him. During his first session with the St. Mary's student advisor they'd had a long talk on why people lied, even professional liars like spies, and what it did to a man's character to lie habitually. Women did it for fun, the advisor said, and then added quickly that he was making a joke. David wasn't sure. But he wound up taking as his elective the Christian Ethics course the advisor recommended. His mother was pleased. Someone told her that Father Moran would be supportive. Of a student with a father absent from home, David supposed, though nobody said it to him.

  He kept making up excuses to himself to skip ethics class that afternoon. He didn't want to blurt out something he couldn't explain. The kids taking the class were hound dogs on the scent for heresy. Some of them had flunked out of seminary and were going through a kind of rehab. Father Moran paid them special attention. The Church needed more priests and nuns to make up for the dropouts. Father Moran was one of the few religious on the faculty and probably wouldn't have lasted at St. Mary's till now if there wasn't the shortage.

  David kept returning to his car all morning to catch the local news on the radio. He was nauseous, and in the mirror he looked as pale as a boiled potato. In the mirror, behind his own face, was the image of a man approaching, looking, David thought, at the license numbers of the cars as he worked his way through the parking lot. David felt in his bones the man was looking for him. He switched off the radio.

  The stranger wore an out-of-date polo coat that was too big for him and a slouch hat that made his face look small, his features pinched, mean. He stooped to look in at David and took a quick survey of the inside of the car at the same time. He pushed his hat back and gestured that he wanted David to roll his window down. Reluctantly David obliged.

  The man couldn't smile. The attempt was like a nervous tic. "You're David Crowley, right? I'm Dennis McGraw." He handed David his business card: Dennis Henry McGraw, Attorney-at-law. "I'm an associate of Deputy Sheriff Addy Muller's. Deputy Muller was on the welcoming committee when you and your friends went down to the beach last night." He gave the tic of a smile. "He could have hauled you in-you know, a public beach. Do you mind if I get in the car with you? It's cold out here." "I have a class in twenty minutes, Mr. McGraw." But the man was already lurching around to the passenger side. He took notice of the scratches and pursed his lips to show his awareness. He eased into the seat alongside David. His coat overflowed it. "They say it's going to rain. Feels more like snow. It's a funny time of year for a beach party. Coming up Halloween, I suppose. And privacy's no problem on the beach in October, is it?" Again, the smirk. "Relax, David. We'll get you to your class on time. Addy said it was a long shot, but he remembered you lived in Oak Forest and could have been driving on the County Road last night…"

  Once again the lie seemed safer to David. He shook his head.

  "The interstate?"

  "That's right," David said.

  "Well, Addy said it was a long shot. I don't know why anyone would take the County Road unless the interstate was shut down… or they had some mischief in mind. About what time was it when you got home?"

  David took alarm. He ought not to have lied. He pumped himself up and said, "It's none of your business, mister, and if you don't get out of this car, I'm going to turn you over to the security police." McGraw spread his hands. "What did I say?" "I want to know why you're asking me these questions." "You aren't giving me a chance to tell you." If David could have stopped his ears, he would have, rather than hear the very thing he wanted to know.

  "But there's no point to it if you didn't take the County Road," McGraw went on. "The reason I asked about the time: There was an accident that shut down the interstate for a couple of hours after midnight. Nobody got through going your direction."

  David was about to say that he must have got through just ahead, but he bit his tongue. He might be able to back out now before he got in deeper. "Could I see your identification, Mr. McGraw? Anybody could pick up that business card you showed me."

  "Smart boy. I'm like Abe Lincoln, David. I have an office but mostly I carry my business in my hat. All you got to do is call up the sheriffs office and speak to Deputy Addy Muller. He'll tell you who I am."

  David drew a deep breath and tried to lie himself out of the he. "I didn't want to get involved in anything. I mean, you're a lawyer and that generally means trouble."

  "I can't argue with you on that, David. I'm the first person my clients call when they get in trouble."

  "I did go home by the County Road, but I don't know what time it was. I was supposed to be in by midnight."

  "Driving alone, were you?"

  "I didn't know many kids at the party. My girlfriend invited me."

  "Didn't you take the young lady home?"

  "She got a ride from one of the other guys. I don't know what you want from me, but I've got to go now and I want to lock the car."

  "Five minutes more?" McGraw said.

  "No, sir. I don't know you and I don't see why I should talk to you."

  "Then I'll tell you what you should do, David. First chance, drive over to the sheriffs office. You know where that is. Ask for Deputy Muller. He's investigating an incident on the County Road last night. He's looking for witnesses."

  And there it was: Something had happened. He'd run away from something real. "Okay, I'll do that," David muttered, his voice shaky. Then, realizing what hadn't been said: "Witness to what?"

  "If you don't know, you better ask Deputy Muller." McGraw stuck out his hand as though expecting David to shake it. He withdrew it before David had a chance to take or refuse it. "Unless you'd like me to repr
esent you? I'm well thought of in the County Building. It's never a mistake to have legal counsel, David, always a mistake to go it on your own. You told me you went home on the interstate. Why did you tell that little he? Addy's going to want to know."

  David turned the key in the ignition. He wasn't sure what to do- one security guard for the whole campus. He had to get rid of this guy. He was a crook, an ambulance chaser. But he knew something.

  "No hard feelings," McGraw said. He opened the car door and slipped out, pulling his coat after him. It clung to the seat and he had to yank it free David wanted to laugh. And cry. McGraw stood wriggling, trying to straigten himself inside the oversize garment. David revved the motor and circled fast. There was a terrible familiarity to the whirr of the tires. He did not look back.

  The whole class jumped on him when he said he thought Judas Iscariot wasn't as bad as the Christians made him out to be. Maybe he thought of himself as a whistle-blower, that Jesus wasn't good for the Jewish people-"Too much forgiveness-you know, like the woman who committed adultery."

  "Money, money, money," students in the back of the room chanted. "He did it for money." It was their way of breaking into David's tirade.

  "But he didn't want the money. Look what he did with it!" David didn't know what was happening to him to be shooting off like this. He didn't even know how long he'd been on his feet. Father Moran had settled his backside on the edge of the desk and folded his arms like a fat Buddha. He was enjoying himself. He loved it when his boys got their adrenaline flowing. Always his boys-he hadn't yet got used to the presence of girls in the class. "I don't think Jesus himself was fair to him," David went on. "He knew Judas was in trouble. He was the one who said the disciples should pray 'Lead us not into temptation.' Man, did Judas ever get led into temptation. What I'm saying is, Jesus knew. He knew what was going to happen to Judas. Look what he said to Saint Peter: 'Before the cock crows, you'll deny me three times.' And Peter did. And he cried. So did Judas. He went out and wept bitterly." David lost his train of thought. Actually, it was Peter who went out and wept bitterly.