by Drury, Tom
A neighborhood of small stucco houses gave way to open hilltops. Charlotte’s house had three stories and was made of concrete with long terraces supported by wooden posts. It was unfinished and didn’t look altogether safe.
Charlotte’s mother was home in the living room trimming a fern that grew by the window, surrounded by a fringe of cuttings.
“You got caught in it,” said Mrs. Mann.
“I thought you’d be working,” said Charlotte.
“They canceled the flight because of a snowstorm in Chicago.”
She snipped a leaf from the fern and leaned back to survey her work and dropped the leaf on the floor.
“Because you see, everything in the flying world is interconnected,” she said.
“This is Micah.”
Mrs. Mann stood and gave him a pretty smile, much like Charlotte’s only with tiny wrinkles around her lips.
“You need dry clothes,” she said.
She went to another part of the house and came back with paint-spattered white coveralls in a neat soft square.
“These belonged to my husband,” she said. “He was an artist and went to Big Sur to do his art, and that was the last we heard of him.”
“Aw, Mom,” said Charlotte, giving her a hug.
Micah waited in Charlotte’s room as she showered. Horse trophies and ribbons lined the bookcase. He put the coveralls on the desk, picked up a journal, and leafed through it as gusts of rain battered the house.
Last night got falling down drunk which I know because I fell down. Had not had that much . . . or so I thought! 1 whiskey + 3 glasses of wine. But then I went outside for a cigarette and put it out on the ground and being thoughtful to the environment tried to pick it up. And that is when I fell over and hit my knee on a block of granite. It still hurts today. Know I should not smoke but sometimes I just do in spite of myself.
Feeling guilty, Micah closed the journal and put it back on the desk. Charlotte entered the room in a robe, the long black curls of her hair washed and shining.
Smiling bashfully, she opened the robe for a moment and closed it again and tied the belt.
“Now you know what that’s all about,” she said.
He blushed and looked away. She was eighteen and he wondered if three more years would make him so at ease. Doubtful.
Charlotte rummaged in a dresser, coming up with white socks and a T-shirt that she put on top of the coveralls for Micah to wear.
When the cuff of her robe rode up, he got a glimpse of red marks on her arm.
“Did you do that?” he said.
She pushed the sleeve up her arm and looked at the broken skin. “I should hope so.”
“You’ve got to calibrate that bite, Char.”
She pushed her hair behind her ears. “Yeah, kind of got away from me, that one.”
Micah took a shower. Bottles of hair products lined the tiles and he looked at quite a few before finding one that was shampoo and said so in English. There were ciments and exfoliants and seaweed and other things that sounded like you would buy them in a garden store. Womanhood seemed highly complicated.
He dried off, got dressed, and went out into the house in stocking feet, happy as he’d ever been. Charlotte and her mother stood looking out the kitchen window at lawn chairs and tricycles and brightly colored toys sliding down the hill in the flood.
“People leave everything out,” said Mrs. Mann.
She had made stew with meat and carrots and onions and ginger and small red potatoes. She dipped a ladle in and brought it up.
“Micah, tell me what this needs.”
Micah put his hand on her hand and tasted the stew.
“It’s perfect.”
“It needs something.”
Micah searched his mind for spices. He didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot by recommending something ridiculous. “Salt,” he said.
“I think you’re right.”
The three of them held hands around the table and Mrs. Mann said a prayer and they ate. The storm had made them hungry, and the sound of silverware in the rain was pleasant rather than tense. After supper they cleared the table and Charlotte washed the dishes and handed them to Micah to dry with a dishcloth. A small TV on the counter played scenes of flooded intersections, unmoored trees, snapping power lines.
“I’d better get home,” said Micah.
Mrs. Mann was standing on a chair and moving things around in the pantry.
“I’m not going out in this, and I’m not sending Charlotte out in this,” she said. “But look what I found.”
Charlotte and Micah turned from the television. Mrs. Mann held a cardboard box with yellowed tape binding the split edges.
Charlotte groaned. “Not Risk. I hate Risk.”
Her mother stepped down from the chair and brushed dust from the cover of the box.
“Charlotte loves Risk,” she told Micah. “She’s just trying to sound grown-up because you’re here.”
Micah called Joan. He spoke to her as Mrs. Mann gestured for the phone.
“Hi, Joan, do you believe this? . . . I know. I know. They’re only guessing like all of us. I rather like it, to be honest. . . . So true. Anyway I have a couple of drowned kittens who turned up at my door, and they will be safe with me till morning.”
Charlotte shook her head, hands covering her face. She dragged her fingers slowly down, showing crescents of red beneath her eyes.
“Drowned kittens,” she whispered.
They played Risk on the floor by the woodstove in the living room. Mrs. Mann took Australia right away and captured Asia in stages. She would win, of course, as this is how anyone wins Risk. Micah based his pieces in Africa and Europe, and Charlotte kept raiding from the west, her mother from the east.
Mrs. Mann smoked a cigarette and tipped the ash on a plate on the carpet.
“It’s always hard to win in Europe,” she said sympathetically.
The night went on, wood falling in the stove and dice rolling softly. Around ten o’clock Charlotte’s mother invaded Alaska with a force too large to dispel, and no one had the resources to take Asia or Ukraine from her.
Micah spent the night on the couch. Light flickered behind the stove grate and the house joints creaked in the wind and rain.
He slept restlessly. The shapes in the room were not the shapes he was used to. He dreamed of soldiers sitting around in a hangar. One played a harmonica. Ethan Frome came in from his school reading wearing a flier’s scarf and asking if anyone had seen Mattie.
Micah woke in the dark with a hand on his mouth. Charlotte stood by the sofa in a white nightgown with roses on it.
“I can’t sleep,” she said.
Micah lifted the blankets for her to crawl under. He was still wearing the painter’s coveralls.
“Can you take those off?” she said.
He stood and took the jumpsuit off. Underneath he wore only the T-shirt and socks she’d given him. Now he had seen what no one saw of her and she had seen the same of him.
They got under the blankets, face-to-face.
“I love you,” said Micah, too fresh from dreams not to say what he meant.
She said, “Charlotte and Micah fix their gaze upon the youthful river.”
A few days later, Micah was home in his room, still reading Ethan Frome. The characters could not catch a break. It was the fifth day of rain. They’d awoke to the sound of news helicopters over a house that might fall into the arroyo. The helicopters hovered most of the day before peeling off to the south when the house didn’t fall.
Joan’s husband knocked on the door. He came in with a box and sat down on the edge of the desk, hitching up the leg of his pants. There was something so adult about the gesture that it made Micah shudder.
“I’ve noticed something,” said Rob. “In the mornings. You’ve been having trouble with your face.”
Micah opened the box. It was an electric shaver. “Thank you,” he said.
“It’s the same model that Eamon has.”
The shaver felt nice and heavy in his hand. “My dad would never get one of these.”
“There are good arguments on both sides.”
“Well, he saw this television show called The Twilight Zone.”
“Oh Christ, Micah.”
“Did you see it?”
“The shaver, the guy, the shaver comes alive, like a cobra, in the bathroom. . . .”
“So yeah, he saw that.”
“‘A Thing About Machines.’ That’s what it was called. There’s nothing like The Twilight Zone in contemporary television.”
“He’s a different sort of person.”
Joan and Rob attended a fund-raiser for film restoration at the New Gaslight Hotel in Hollywood. They were photographed in a step-and-repeat before a white backdrop with the restoration society’s logo. A woman held paper signs identifying them, for surely, Joan thought, no one would know otherwise:
JOAN GOWER
FORENSIC MYSTIC
ROB HAMMERHILL
ANIMAL PARTY
Shutters snapped as a crowd of photographers yelled for their attention. They treated everyone like big stars.
“To your left, Joan.”
“Right above, Joan.”
“Don’t smile, Rob.”
“Down the middle, Joan.”
“He’s so demanding, isn’t he?”
“Full front now. Full front please.”
They went into the ballroom and found their table. After dinner there was a screening of clips from old movies before and after the film had been restored and enhanced.
An old man carried a birthday cake to his bedridden daughter six times with the colors becoming more natural with each repetition. Everyone clapped as if this were the most amazing thing ever.
Once Joan had shied away from show business gatherings, assuming she’d find herself out of place, but she had learned over time that, with the exception of caterers, most everyone felt out of place and couldn’t wait to go outside and smoke.
After the program, Rob went to the checkroom to get their coats while Joan waited in the gold lobby. The green carpet was composed of sinuous vines and three-headed seed pods like eyes on stalks.
“Hello, Joan,” said the screenwriter.
His face was red and his eyes looked larger and sadder than ever.
“Gray,” said Joan. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“You’re looking restored and enhanced this evening.”
“You are kind,” said Joan. “And you are drunk.”
“I’m kind of drunk.”
“My husband is getting our coats.”
“I look forward to meeting him.”
“Please don’t.”
“I saw you running one time,” said Gray. “Your ponytail goes back and forth like a metronome. It seems so automatic it puzzled me. Shouldn’t it be more random? And then I understood. It was obvious. Once it’s back, there’s nowhere for it to go but forth.”
Joan turned away but he caught her hand and pulled her back.
“Or take lightning,” he said. “It strikes the highest tree, we know that, but how does it know how high the trees are? It’s not like lightning can see trees. The path is the answer, which must be formed from above and below.”
“You’re hurting my hand. This is getting weird and upsetting.”
Rob came back with the coats. Joan considered introducing them as if everything was normal and decent, but then she realized with sudden clarity that she could just leave.
Under the awning, she put her coat on, buttoned it, and stood waiting. Rob and Gray were talking in the lobby. Of all the discreet people she might have laid, she thought.
Rob and Joan rode home in silence, listening to the rain on the roof, the splash of the tires, the unbearably tense sound of the turn signal.
“What have you done, Joan,” said Rob. “What have you done.”
She leaned her head against the window of the car. The glass was cool and refreshing. They drove by the Paradise Motel, where the lurid purple lights slid over rain-streaked windows. The only bond Joan could not break was with Micah. She was tired of all the other men in the world.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AGENT BETTY Lee called Dan at his office in the morning to say they had raided Jack Snow’s warehouse and found him dead.
Dan replied that the northern quarter of the trainyard was unincorporated so they should call the sheriff’s office, for which he provided the telephone number.
Dan got coffee at the Red Robin and drove to the trainyard and gave a cup to each agent. They went to look at Jack Snow. He had cuts on both arms and a gash on the side of the neck. He’d died between a sword and a shield.
“Good God Almighty,” said Dan.
“Maybe Omaha?” said Agent Anders.
“They would have taken the money.”
“What money?”
“Look at his coat pocket.”
“Oh yeah.”
“He came to my house last night,” said Dan. “When we were at the airport. Knocked Louise down. My wife. He thought I was the one after him.”
“What’d you do?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t going to leave after he’d been there once.”
“You should’ve called the cops,” said Agent Lee. “It might have saved his life.”
“Or got some cops killed,” said Dan.
They went to the doorway and looked out at a string of open boxcars rolling down the tracks. Panels of sunlight slid over the ground. They stood drinking coffee.
“Where’s his car?” said Dan.
“That’s a good question.”
“I’d find that. At least there’d be someone to talk to.”
“You say it’s county jurisdiction,” said Agent Anders.
“The city ends about an eighth of a mile over,” said Dan. “Unless you guys want to claim it.”
“Our instructions are to get out.”
“What about that thing he was getting? That rock.”
Then Dan remembered his conversation with Sandra Zulma at the Continental Hotel and thought maybe she was not so crazy as she seemed.
“It’s not here,” said Agent Lee.
“Anyway,” said Anders, “the whole point of that was to get him to talk, which ain’t happening now. This is local. This is homicide.”
“You called the sheriff’s office.”
“They’re on the way.”
“They’ve got to come up from Morrisville,” said Dan. “Ed Aiken is sheriff now. He used to deputy for me. Ed gets kind of flustered, but I bet he can find a red Mustang with a dent on the back.”
“I don’t remember a dent,” said Agent Anders.
“Louise hit it with a softball bat.”
“This is the Wild fucking West you got here.”
“Well, she wasn’t having somebody come into the house,” said Dan. “Don’t know how I’m going to tell her about this.”
They heard a siren coming from the south.
The Mustang was at that moment parked behind the house of Sandra’s cousin Terry. Sandra had come in the night when he was asleep.
She’d walked in the back door and washed the sword in the kitchen sink. Then she dried it off and treated it with 3 IN 1 from the cupboard and sat at the table working the oil into the blade with a cotton rag.
It was not much of a sword, but she would not likely run into somebody with a better one.
She scrubbed the sink with
Comet and turned on the water, the blood and the scraps from Terry’s plates running down the drain.
She yawned and took the sword into the living room, where she fell asleep on the davenport.
Terry made pancakes for breakfast, and they ate from china plates in the living room. He wore a blue sweatshirt with the hood up around his face.
“See you got some wheels.”
“I’ll be leaving shortly.”
“Did you find Jack?”
“I did.”
“What happened?”
“He’s dead.”
“He is not.”
Sandra took the sword by the grip and stuck the point in the carpet.
“His chariot stands empty, Cousin.”
Terry ate some pancakes and laid the fork on the plate.
“He is not. Sandy.”
Sandra kept eating.
“It was fair combat,” she said.
“I can’t be part of this.”
“I said I was leaving.”
“I didn’t see you. I didn’t talk to you.”
“You don’t even know who I am.”
Sandra Zulma wrapped some pancakes in aluminum foil and took them and the sword out to the car and drove down to the highway. She would never see Terry’s house again. She’d not gone ten miles before a sheriff’s car pulled out of a high and treeless intersection on Route 41 and fell in behind the Mustang.
Deputies Sheila Geer and Earl Kellogg followed the red car. Sheila and Earl did not trust each other, and Earl was not trusted generally, but they’d made an accommodation, part of which was that Sheila drove when they rode together. She’d been to racing school in Milwaukee and was the best driver of all the police in the county.
Earl could not deny her talent behind the wheel. In seminars he’d been forced to attend, he’d learned that women are as good as men in all ways, save upper-body strength, and that even this was an open question.
When they got close enough to the Mustang to see the bent spoiler, Sheila hit the siren and lightbar.
“Let’s find out what she’ll do,” she said.
Sandra geared the Mustang back, the tach needle jumped, and the cruiser fell away in the mirror for a while before coming up fast.
