No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

“Like what?”

  “Something that would cause you to stop work.”

  “Zoning ordinances,” Red said, and his hands disappeared into the pockets of his robe, searching around as if he expected to find something down there. “We’re just waiting on the permits, that’s all. Red tape. You know how it is—or maybe you don’t.” With a shrug, he stepped out of Aunt Pauline’s doorway, and Scott walked past him, close enough to read the embroidery on the robe: Holiday Inn. Red’s hand reached out and touched Scott’s arm, applying slight pressure on a nerve just above the elbow.

  “What exactly did your brother say?” Red’s voice asked from behind him.

  “He said you found another body down there—a child.”

  “Unbelievable.” Red sounded genuinely awed at Owen’s imaginative capacity. “What bottle did he pour that one out of?”

  “He sounded pretty convinced.”

  “Sure he did. If we did find a body, why would we cover it up? Don’t you think we would have reported it to the cops?”

  Scott didn’t know what to say. He was thinking of what Owen had said, about grabbing the boy on his way up the aisle. He looked like Henry. Who had Owen taken him from—the boy’s mother? Another thought: What if … But it was already gone.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Red said, “guilt surely is a bitch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look at it this way, if it weren’t for your great-uncle showing his movie there on that particular night, all those people who died in that fire would still be alive.” He must have seen the expression on Scott’s face and added, “No offense, but that’s the truth of it, right? That’s a lot to carry around, especially for a guy like Owen. Could be that finding those old reels of film sent him right over the edge.”

  “You make it sound like Butch’s movie killed all those people.”

  “Of course it didn’t. It was just a fire. I mean, they never did find out what caused it, but …”

  “I thought it was a wiring problem,” Scott said. “In the projection room.”

  Red shook his head. “It started at the front of the theater, by the screen.”

  “But there were wires up there too, right?”

  “I’m just saying the mind can be a mysterious thing,” Red said. His smile was both thoughtful and enigmatic. “Especially when it comes to guilt.”

  Downstairs, Scott could hear the softly trundling squeak of Aunt Pauline’s wheelchair moving restlessly from room to room, waiting for him to deliver her hearing aid.

  “Hey,” Red said, “you dropped these.”

  Scott looked back and saw Red was holding the bottle of pills, reading the print on the label. “Brain candy, huh?” He pursed his lips. “Funny, I didn’t pick you for the type.”

  “There’s a type?”

  “Sure,” Red said, and shrugged. “But maybe not.”

  “Red, honey?” A small, hesitant voice floated down the hall, a woman, but not Colette, familiar from somewhere. He couldn’t place it, but he didn’t have to—she was coming out of the room now with a sheet wrapped just above her breasts. “Oh, I didn’t realize …”

  Scott immediately noticed the little brown birthmark at the corner of her bubble-gum mouth. He was looking at Dawn Wheeler, the town librarian. Upon recognizing Scott, she blushed but kept her chin tilted slightly upward, embarrassed but triumphant, as if she’d proved something to him just by being here. I finally got to sleep with the quarterback.

  “Get dressed, baby. And you”—Red patted Scott on the shoulder—“Tell your brother I said hi,” he said. That poker player’s smile was just as unreadable as ever. “Tell him I’ll be in touch.”

  “AUNT PAULINE?”

  The old woman sat with her back to him, slumped in her wheelchair in the kitchen, gray head cocked to one side, knotted hair resting on one shoulder. Scott’s first thought was that she was dead, had suffered a heart attack or a stroke, scant seconds before he’d returned.

  But she was only fixing tea and rotated around to look at him, almost playfully. “My hearing aid?”

  He gave it to her. “I saw the poster in your room for a play called One Room, Unfinished.”

  “Yes.”

  “You remember it?”

  “Of course I do. I was going to be the star. It would have been a breakout role for me, a little past my prime.” She smiled, almost saucily. “But once you get past thirty, who’s counting?”

  “What happened?”

  Some of the pleasure dimmed from her expression, as if an invisible hand had reached in and adjusted her rheostat, dialing it down. “It was never produced,” she said. “When Tom couldn’t finish writing it—oh, the investors were furious. They threatened to sue him for every penny he had, but by then it was too late, of course, and there was nothing any of us could do.”

  “What was the play about?”

  Aunt Pauline blew on her tea, brought it to her lips, sipped, and winced. “A house.”

  “Why couldn’t he finish it?”

  “Writer’s block.” She folded her hands and squinted up at Scott, until he could almost feel himself blurring in and out of focus in her eyes. “He said he couldn’t write in New York—too many distractions. So he came back here to that house in the woods, Round House, out by the pond. It’s so peaceful out there, you know, so secluded. He wrote for a while, but the closer he came to understanding what truly happened, the more … difficult things became for him. When the time came for him to write about her, things started to change for him, and … well, he just never recovered.”

  “What do you mean, things started to change? ‘Her’ who?”

  A door slammed upstairs, and Scott looked around to see Dawn Wheeler charging down in a flood of tears, bumping him out of the way on her rush to the front door. A moment later, Red followed, not hurrying, humming softly and reeking of freshly applied cologne. In the foyer, he hesitated over a dozen species of outerwear before selecting a gorgeous camel hair coat and sliding it over his mountainous frame.

  “I’ll be back later, Auntie,” he said. “In case anyone asks.”

  Keys rattled faintly, and the door clicked shut behind him. In the wheelchair, Pauline clutched her tea and rocked slightly back and forth in silent but palpable delight. As Scott returned his attention to her, he had the uncanny feeling that Aunt Pauline had not only followed exactly what just happened but had been waiting patiently for the outcome throughout the entire encounter.

  “What happened to the playwright?” Scott asked.

  Pauline bowed her head, clucked her tongue sympathetically. “He met with a bad end.”

  “He died?”

  “Not before he went completely insane.”

  “But he couldn’t finish the play?”

  “No.” She held up one root-gnarled finger, correcting him as carefully as a Latin proctor making a slight but critical distinction in verb conjugation. “The play was why he went crazy—it runs in your family.”

  “What?” Scott asked.

  “That play was inspired by an incomplete story that his father had written. What Tommy discovered in it drove him over the edge. He began to see things in the pond behind the house … bodies sunk to the bottom, poor darlings, wrapped in chains to keep them from rising back up. In the end, he simply couldn’t stay away from it.”

  From what? Scott wondered. The pond, the bodies, or the unfinished play? “But these things he saw,” he said, “they weren’t real, were they?”

  “Given his lineage, real is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean, his lineage?”

  “Well …” Pauline raised two tiny, upturned hands and smiled, as if this simple gesture explained everything: “He was a Mast, after all.”

  “I’m a Mast,” Scott said.

  The old woman smiled. “Of course you are, dear.”

  SCOTT DROVE BACK THROUGH TOWN and north. The old highway was plowed and clear, but twenty yards after turning off onto the dir
t road where his father had met his death, passing those old metal gates, the car hit a drift it couldn’t handle and sank into a foot of snow.

  “Shit.” He climbed out and felt his leg disappear to the knee in a mantle of smooth, unbroken white. The wind seethed and fretted over the plain, sifting restlessly through dry powder as if searching for something irretrievably lost. Midafternoon had begun to turn the shadows blue all around him.

  Make your move.

  Without actually making a formal decision to continue, he started following the road deeper into the woods. It felt much farther on foot. Twenty minutes from here, people were watching cable TV, reading Harry Potter, and surfing the Web, but out here it was still 1956.

  Or 1882.

  Why had he thought of that particular year? Of course he knew exactly why—it had been the decade of Rosemary Carver’s disappearance. He remembered that now. What if time had somehow stopped then, and the same woodland animals that were alive then were alive now, watching him from the edge of the forest?

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep—

  The cliché of thinking about Robert Frost in a New England forest brought him a fleeting moment of comfort, but the wind was there immediately to wipe it away. Up ahead, the road curved into its final turn, trees retreating into snowy openness, everything so different when he experienced it like this, larger and more immediate. He could’ve sworn the road hadn’t gone this far, that the forest wasn’t quite as thick here. But that wasn’t possible, of course—there was only one dirt road off the old country highway. This had to be it.

  He came out of the trees and saw the house. Eyeless. A peculiar adjective, since there were plenty of windows, and since—

  Even from this distance, it seemed to be staring back at him. It made him think of the painting he’d found, and it occurred to him that this was the exact angle that it had been painted from. He wondered what it would be like to see a shadow moving inside the house, past the windows and behind the curtains.

  There are other ways of watching.

  “Stop that shit,” he said, hating the way his voice shook.

  Fresh tire tracks marked the snow around him. Someone had been here recently. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Fusco’s.

  “Scott,” Sonia’s voice answered. She must have recognized the number on caller ID because her greeting was a statement, not a question. In the background, he could hear glasses clinking, men’s voices, the brisk snap of a cue ball.

  “Is Owen there?”

  Dark and deep.

  “Not yet,” she said, “but he’ll probably be.”

  “What about Red?”

  Long pause. “What’s this about?” Sonia asked, and when he didn’t reply: “Listen, I’m working till midnight. Why don’t you drop by and we’ll talk?”

  Promises to keep.

  “Sounds good.” As he spoke, he was still making his way toward the house, careful steps, never taking his eyes off the door. Less than twenty feet from it now and the only sound in the world was the powdery scrunch of his boots through still-fresh snow. “But I’ve got some things I need to take care of out here first.”

  “Where are you?” Sonia asked, seeming to realize something as she spoke. “You’re not—Scott, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go back into that house right now.”

  He stepped up onto the porch. “I’ll be fine.”

  “What happened last night? We never talked about it.”

  “What happened sixteen years ago?”

  She fell silent again but not for as long as he’d expected.

  “We can talk about that too,” Sonia said quietly.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said, reaching for the doorknob.

  Before he could touch it, it turned by itself, the door swinging open to reveal the face of the woman standing just behind it, grinning at him.

  BEER. WHISKEY. BEER.

  Sonia wasn’t happy with the way the phone call with Scott had ended. Truth to tell, very little about the conversation pleased her, though some part of her realized the last thing he’d mentioned—what happened sixteen years ago—had been inevitable. Getting it out in the open would be a relief, but it would be painful, lancing the wound for the therapeutic value of it. And there were always other types of therapy.

  Beer. Beer. Tequila shot.

  She poured them all, plus one for herself, Old Grand-Dad, throwing it back before loading up the tray, feeling the hungry stares as she lifted it up, her breasts rising beneath her T-shirt, all part of the show, tips for tits, and wasn’t she proud?

  “Thanks, Sonia.”

  “Lookin’ good, baby.”

  “Keep the change, doll.”

  From over by the pool table: “Yo, sweetheart, can we get another round over here?”

  “You got it,” she said. Beer, beer, whiskey. Most of them weren’t even particular about the brand, and those who were, she already had their preferences down pat, either Budweiser, Miller, or Molson Canadian, if they were feeling exotic. Her whiskey drinkers were all Jack Daniel’s or Jim Beam men, except for—

  “Macallan, light rocks,” Red muttered, easing out of his coat as he took his seat beside an empty stool. “And a drink for my friend.”

  Sonia’s retort—You’ve got one?—stuck in her throat when she saw Owen Mast coming through the door with Henry at his heels, the boy looking even more lost and forlorn than usual. Sonia felt the sunburned sting of fresh rage moving from her spine outward toward her scalded skin, and Red must have seen it too, because he reached out and touched her hand with his, covering it.

  “I’ll take care of this,” he said, holding her stare. “Okay?”

  “He shouldn’t be in here,” Sonia heard herself growl, like a caged cat. “Not after what happened last night. I don’t want to see him here.”

  “Relax, princess.”

  “I hate it when you call me—”

  “Hey, gorgeous,” somebody called out, “how about a stiff one?”

  Uproarious laughter greeted this never-before-heard witticism. Sonia nodded, distracted, but Red was already raising one hand, beckoning Owen over to the bar. “Hey, there he is, alive and well. Come on over.”

  Owen hesitated suspiciously, his boy waiting behind him, an acolyte before his father’s hesitation. Sonia knew that his next move would be straight to the stool next to Red’s, where the three of them—Red, Owen, and Henry—would line up at the bar like some weird diagram of manhood in reverse.

  “What are you drinking?” Red asked. “Let me guess: Budweiser with a Jack Daniel’s back.”

  But Owen didn’t answer, and he didn’t take the stool next to Red’s. For an instant, he seemed conflicted about which way to go, and then he turned and walked up to the little stage in the front of the bar, where the three-piece country bands sometimes played on Friday and Saturday nights. Tonight there was just an acoustic guitar up there, property of a local troubadour named John Austin, currently parked at the other end of the bar nursing a Maker’s Mark over crushed ice. The singer wasn’t even watching as Owen climbed up onstage, but Sonia was, and so was Red.

  “Whoa, buddy,” Red said, half smiling, approaching Owen slowly, like an animal he didn’t quite trust. “I don’t think you wanna do this, do you?”

  Owen ignored him and looked out at the crowd of curious faces gazing up at him. The pool game had paused, and the players were watching with morbid curiosity as Owen picked up John Austin’s guitar and leaned in toward the mike. He tapped it once, satisfied that it was live, and took in a breath. Sonia, who had seen Owen humiliate himself in the bar too many times to count, experienced the nearly overwhelming urge to cover her eyes, or at least shield Henry’s view, but she knew it was too late. Even Red had stopped trying to prevent Owen from whatever he was about to do. There was no other choice now but to hope he kept it short.

  “Tonight,” Owen said, “I’d like to play a song I learned from my grandpa Tommy.”

>   He struck a single chord on the guitar, and the entire bar fell silent. There was nothing ragged or reluctant about the sound: It was perfect. Sonia had never heard Owen play before—had no idea he even could play—but the chords poured effortlessly from the guitar, one after another, Owen rocking slightly forward with the strings under his fingers as he put his mouth to the microphone.

  When he sang, his voice was a rusty croak, worn-out and reed-thin:

  Tall man, tall man, dressed in black …

  Come to take his daughter back …

  Walkin’ down that lonely road

  Walkin’ down that lonely track …

  He picked out a few more notes on the guitar, fingers moving nimbly now, not missing a lick, coming back to sing:

  Cross him once, you’ll learn the way

  Cross him twice, you’ll rue the day

  He’s the man, the devil’s own

  Come to take his daughter home …

  There were more lines to the song, but the guitar overwhelmed them, and Owen hung back from the mike, croaking words that Sonia couldn’t hear. When he finished, the bar was utterly silent. Then somebody started to clap. Another patron joined in. A moment later, the bar was full of the sound of applause and cheers. Rather than acknowledging any of it, Owen just stepped down to the bar, back to where Henry sat on his stool, gaping at his father in total disbelief.

  “Listen to that,” Red said. “You hear that, Sonia? Get the man a drink.”

  “Red,” Sonia said, “I don’t think this is—”

  “Just one. Whatever he wants.”

  “Not unless he wants coffee,” Sonia said.

  “What?” Red’s smile wilted a little in disbelief. “You’re denying us service now?”

  Sonia realized that she was. Maybe it was the thrill of hearing Owen get up onstage and hammer out a song that set them all on their ear. In any case, it felt good to deny Red something. Why hadn’t she started earlier? “Bingo,” she said.

  “All right.” Suddenly the former football player’s cordial expression looked painted on and already beginning to peel. “Fair enough,” he said, no longer looking at her, dumping a pile of bills on the counter. “Come on, Owen, there’s friendlier places to get shitty, even in this shitty town.”