by John Dunning
I looked at Rigby. “Had you ever done anything like that?”
He shook his head.
“He had to figure it out as he went along,” Eleanor said.
“Gaston can do anything, once he sets his mind to it,” said Crystal.
“Anybody can, with a little time and patience,” Rigby said.
“We spent two days in that basement,” Eleanor said, “tearing down this machine, packing the parts, and putting them on the truck. It was so cold your hands would stick to the steel when you touched it, and all around us the wreckers were stringing explosives.”
“But we got the damn thing,” Crystal said, “and sang Christmas carols all the way home…in February.”
“We thought of getting the heater fixed in Montana,” Eleanor said, “but by then, hey, it was up to ten degrees—a major heat wave.”
“And we could smell home,” Rigby said.
I could almost feel the satisfaction and joy of getting it set up here in working order, and I said something to the effect.
“Yeah,” Crystal said, “even I can’t deny that.”
“You can’t put a label on it,” Rigby said.
“Somehow you mean more to each other,” Eleanor said, “after you’ve done something like that.”
A sudden silence fell over the table. The evening was over, and I knew that, once again, I was not going to bust her. I didn’t know why—it certainly wasn’t Poe anymore—but I was ready to live with it, whatever happened.
“You’ll find a lot of books over there if you’d like to read,” Crystal said. “Sorry there’s no TV.”
I made a so-who-needs-it gesture with my hands.
“Breakfast at six-thirty,” she said. “That’s if you want to eat with us. I’ll rustle you up something whenever you come over.”
She walked me to the door, leaving Eleanor and her father alone at the kitchen table. On the porch she took my hand. “Thank you,” she whispered. Then she hugged me tight and disappeared back into the house. I stood on the porch listening to the rain. The night was as dark as it ever gets, but I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from my back. There would be no bust, no handcuffs, no force. I watched my five grand grow wings and fly away into the night. Half the puzzle was finished.
Now that I knew what I was not going to do, I thought I could sleep.
9
I opened my eyes to the ringing of the telephone. It was five after three by the luminous clock on the table beside me: I had been asleep almost five hours. Par for the course, I thought, staring into the dark where the phone was. I let it ring, knowing it couldn’t be for me, but it kept on until I had to do something about it. When I picked it up, Eleanor was there in my ear.
“I’m coming over. Is that okay?”
“I don’t know…what’ll your parents say?”
But she had hung up. I rolled over and sat on the bed. When five minutes had passed and she hadn’t arrived, I groped my way to the window and looked across at the house. It was dark except for a faint light on the side facing away from me. Soon that too went out—someone in a bathroom, I thought—but then another light came on in the opposite corner. Something moved in the yard: I couldn’t tell what as I tried to see through the rain-streaked glass, but it looked like some critter standing under the window had moved quickly back into the darkness. A deer maybe, or just a mirage thrown out by a brain still groggy from too little sleep. But I hadn’t forgotten about Eleanor’s stalker and I sat on the sill and watched the yard. The light went out and again I swam in an all-black world. I sat for a long time looking at nothing.
At ten to four I decided that she wasn’t coming and I went back to bed.
I heard a sharp click somewhere, then a bump. There she is , I thought. But nothing happened. The drumming of the rain was the only reminder that I could still think and I could still hear. The minutes stretched toward the dawn. There was not yet a hint of light, which, given the clouds covering the state, was at least ninety minutes away. Again a light flashed. This one brought me up with a start—it was here in my room, inches away. As my eyes focused, I saw that it was the extension button on the telephone— someone had picked up the phone downstairs in the printshop and was having a conversation at four o’clock in the morning. This went on for some time, at least two minutes, then the line went dark. I rolled out of bed and went to the door, opened it, and listened down the circular staircase. Nothing . No sound, no light, not a hint of movement anywhere.
I lay on the bed staring up into the dark. Eventually, though I wouldn’t have believed it possible, I began to doze off.
***
It was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream. I was drifting, somewhere between worlds, when my eyes flicked open and I knew she was there. “Hey,” I said, and I felt her sit beside me on the floor. I reached out and touched her head: she had laid it across her folded arms on the bed. “Thought you’d never get here.” She still didn’t speak: for several minutes she just lay there under my arm, her breathing barely audible above the rain. Then she said, “I didn’t come because I felt stupid. I am stupid, waking you up in the middle of the night.”
“It’s okay, I was awake anyway,” I lied.
“The truth of the matter is, I’ve just been through the loneliest night of my life. It got so desolate I thought I’d die from it.”
There was a long pause. She said, “I keep thinking that maybe my mom and dad can help me when I get like this, but they can’t. I know they love me, but somehow knowing it just makes the loneliness all the stronger. Does that make any sense?”
“You’re not their little girl anymore. You’ve lost something you can’t ever get back, but you haven’t yet found what’s gonna take the place of it in the next part of your life.”
“The next part of my life,” she said with a sigh.
I could hear the pain in her voice. “I’ll help you,” I said, “if you’ll let me.”
She seemed to consider it. “Just talk to me, help me get through the night. I know you want to sleep and I’m being a thundering pain in the ass. But you have no idea how much it would help, Mr. Man from Nowhere, if you’d just talk to me for a little while.”
“Listen and believe it. There’s nothing I’d rather do, right this minute, than talk to you.”
“Oh, Janeway.” Her voice got thick, and broke. “I hurt so bad. I hurt so bad and I can’t talk to anyone.”
“Talk to me.”
“I don’t know, maybe somebody like you, who’s just passing through and doesn’t know me. I can’t talk to Mamma and Daddy, there’s just too much in the way. I don’t know what it is, we can’t get past the facts of the matter and get down where the real trouble is.”
“What are the facts of the matter?”
“How completely and beyond redemption I’ve fucked up my life.”
“Maybe it just seems that way.”
“I’ve done a stupid thing. Don’t ask me why, it was just insane. I felt compelled, like I had no choice. Then they said I’d done something worse, and one thing led to another and I did do something worse…only it wasn’t what they said I’d done. But they locked me up for it, and now they want to lock me up again, maybe for years. If they do that, I will kill myself, I swear I will. I couldn’t live in a cage.”
“None of us can. That’s not really living.”
“But some people survive. I couldn’t even do that, not if we’re talking about years.” She shook her head: I felt the movement. “No way.”
Gently, I prodded her. “What did you do?”
She was a long time answering, and at first the answer was no answer at all. “I can’t tell you either.”
“I won’t judge you.”
“It’s not that. There are pieces of the story missing. Without them I just look like a fool.”
“Take the chance. Maybe I can help you find the pieces.”
“No one can. None of it makes sense. I’m like that guy in The Man Without a Country , I’v
e got no roots, nothing solid to hold on to. I love my parents but I have an awful time talking to them.”
“Everybody does. It means you’re one hundred percent normal.”
She chuckled, a sad little noise. “And all the time I thought I was crazy. I have the worst time trying to talk to them. And I know I’ve got to, I don’t think I can let another day pass without doing that. But how can I?”
“Try it out on me first.”
She didn’t say anything. I let her alone for a few minutes, then I nudged her arm. “What happened to you?”
“I was in New Mexico,” she said at once, as if she’d been waiting for me to ask it one more time. “I got in trouble…I can’t tell you about that. But I’ve been carrying it around for weeks now. If I don’t tell somebody…”
I gave her a little squeeze: nothing sexual, just friendly encouragement,
“That’s where I picked up my stalker, in Taos.” Again she tried to lapse into silence. But then she said, “I had a room there. I’d come home and things would be moved.”
“Ransacked?”
“No…but yeah, maybe. I had the feeling he’d done that, been through all my stuff and then put it all back, just so. But he’d always leave one little thing out of place, something obvious like he’d wanted me to see it. Once he left a cigarette, still burning in a Styrofoam cup. He wanted me to know he’d just left. Then he started with the phone. It would ring late at night and I’d hear him breathing…or humming that song.”
“You told me before: you knew what he wanted.”
“He told me. But I can’t explain it now, so don’t ask me.”
“Explain what you can.”
“I felt like something evil had come into my life. I’d turn a corner and he’d be there, right in my path. He looked like a cadaver, his eyes were all sunken and he had holes in his face, deep pits across both cheeks. Scared me deaf and dumb. I can’t tell you what it was like. I’d walk down to the phone booth and call home and he’d come up behind me, rip open the door, and stand there staring. He said he could kill me, right there at the telephone— kill you and go up to North Bend and kill your mother too . God, I just freaked. Then one night he got into my room when I was sleeping. When I woke up the next morning there was a dead…rat…on the bed beside me. And I really freaked.”
I was listening to her words, trying to figure how and when this had all happened. It had to be sometime after the first Jeffords break-in, but before the second. Whatever else her stalker had done, he’d pushed her onto that next level of desperation. She had failed to get what she’d gone after at the Jeffords place—what the stalker also wanted—and had gone back for another run at it. Then what?
Then she took it on the lam: jumped bail, struck out for home. “So how’d you get back here?” I asked. She had driven her car, she said in that flat tone of voice that people use when you ask a stupid question. But I was trying to get at something else, something she couldn’t yet know about. “What roads did you take?” I asked, and she laughed and wondered what possible difference it could make. “I came across the Sangres, up the Million-Dollar Highway to Grand Junction, then took the freeway home.”
Slater had lied about her coming through Denver. He had probably lied about other things as well. The pockmarked man sounded like someone I had met quite recently, and my whole involvement felt suddenly dirty.
I couldn’t get her to say any more. “I’ve already said too much,” she said. “If I keep on, I’ll feel worse than ever. Maybe I should just take poison and save us all the grief.”
“That, of course, would be the worst thing you could do.” I calculated my next line and said it anyway. “I hope you’re not one of those people who turn suicidal on me.”
“Have you known people like that?”
“One or two. It’s always tragic, especially when they’re young.”
“I saw you looking at the scar on my arm. Back in the restaurant.”
“No use lying about it. I couldn’t help noticing.”
“Well, you’re right. I did that to myself.”
“Why?”
“Loneliness,” she said without missing a heartbeat. “Desolation, the undertow, the barren landscape. I can’t explain it. The loneliest times come when I’m adrift in a big city, or here with people who love me. When I’m really alone, up on a mountaintop somewhere, I’m fine. I go up to Archie’s cabin and I can go for a week without seeing another living soul. The feeling of peace is just incredible. Too bad we can’t live our lives on mountaintops. I really like being with people until I actually am, then I can’t stand them. Maybe I should try to find Jesus; people say that works, though I can’t imagine it working for me. I’m just not spiritually oriented. So I drift. Sometimes I don’t even know where the road’s gonna take me.”
“Talk to me, Eleanor. You got in trouble in New Mexico, then you came back here. What happened then?”
“Nothing. That’s the stupid part of it. I came fifteen hundred miles and I couldn’t go the last mile home. Instead I drove out to see Amy. But she wasn’t home and I couldn’t find her.”
“Who’s Amy?”
“Amy Harper. She was my best friend till she married Coleman Willis. The cock that walks like a man. Our relationship got a bit strained after that. It’s hard to stay friends with someone when her husband hates you.”
“How could anyone hate you?”
“I wouldn’t go to bed with him. To a guy who wears his brain between his legs, that’s the last word in insults.”
In a while I said, “So you went to see Amy but Amy wasn’t there. You wouldn’t want to kill yourself over that. Amy’ll be back.”
“How do you know?”
“People always come back.”
“Maybe so, but I won’t be here.”
No, I thought: you probably won’t be.
“What did you do then?” I said.
“Drove out to my parents’ place. Stood in the rain watching the house, afraid to come up and talk to them. God, I’ve never been so alone in my life. Then I saw them come out and drive off—going to town, I figured, for the week’s groceries. I went over to the house and sat on the porch. I wanted to die but I didn’t know how. I thought if I could just lie down and close my eyes and not wake up, I’d do it. But it’s not that easy. It’s impossible, in fact; I don’t want to die , for God’s sake, I never wanted to die. I thought maybe I could find some peace in the printshop. I used to do that when I was a little girl. When I’d get blue, I’d go back in the shop and put my cheek against that cold press and I could feel the warmth come flooding into me, especially if there were books back there and if they were books I loved. I could take a book and hold it to my heart and the world was somehow less hostile, less lonely.”
“Did that work?”
“It always works, for a while. But it’s like anything else that has fantasy at its roots. Eventually you’ve got to come back to earth. Now I’m running out of time. Something will happen, today, tomorrow…some-thing’ll happen and I’ll be history.”
She pulled herself up on the bed. I heard her shoes hit the floor.
“Would you do something for me, Mr. Janeway?”
“If I can.”
“Hold me.”
“I don’t think that’ll be any great hardship.”
“That’s all I want…just…just…”
“Sure,” I said, taking her into the cradle of my arm.
She was shivering. I drew the blanket up under my chin and the body heat spread around us. Her hair smelled sweet, as if she had just washed it. I knew I had no business smelling her hair. She snuggled tight against me and I had no right to that either. Maybe she’d go to sleep now. Maybe I could forget she was there, just like the people at Lakehurst forgot the Hindenburg when it was blowing up in front of them. Somewhere in the night Helen Reddy was singing “I Am Woman” and I was thinking you sure are , to the same driving melody. I had been what seemed like a very long time without a woman, and
this one was forbidden, for more reasons than I could count.
We lay still on the bed, and slowly the dark gave way to a pale and ghostly gray. Saved by the dawn. It was five-thirty: the Rigbys would be getting up for the new day. I patted her shoulder and rolled out of bed, moving to the window for a look at the house. It was peaceful and ordinary in the rainy morning, nothing like the den of tears I had blundered into last night. I turned and looked at Eleanor. Her face was a white blur in the half-light: her eyes, I thought, were open. We didn’t say anything. I hit the John, and when I came out, she had not moved from her spot on the bed. I looked out the window. Someone in the house had turned on a light, the same one I had seen earlier. I knew then what I was going to do.
“Listen,” I said, still looking out the window. “I’ve got to tell you something.” But I never got the words out. A car came out of the misty woods and up the road toward the house. I felt heartsick watching it come. Only when it had pulled in behind my rental and stopped did the cop behind the wheel turn on his flasher.
It filled the room and colored us a flickery red and blue. Eleanor lay still as death. Down in the yard, two county cops had stepped out in the rain. One walked up the steps, meeting the Rigbys as they came out on the porch. The other came up the path to the printshop.
“Judgment day,” Eleanor said. “I had a feeling it would be today.”
10
Next case.“
”The matter of Eleanor Jane Rigby, Your Honor. Filing number one three seven five nine six.“
“Is this the prisoner?…are you Eleanor Jane Rigby?” “Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you understand the nature of this proceeding?”
“I think so.”
“Let’s be sure. This is an extradition hearing, to determine whether you will be returned to the state of New Mexico to face criminal charges outstanding there. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You may contest the extradition or waive that right. Do you have an attorney?”
