The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  Let it go, damn you!

  “Try.”

  “We were driving...” Kath said in a baby voice, “and singing...

  “Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts,” she sang in a voice both wistful and otherworldly, a voice that got inside Scott like something dead. Then her eyes rolled back and her hands curled into fists, and he wanted to stop her, but he wanted her to go on, too, to tell him what she’d seen. He reached for Kath’s hand but she jerked it away.

  “We were driving and singing, singing and driving, and...oh, so sorry, Mister Groundhog, you’re dead..and...and then...we hit him...he was dead and we hit him...”

  “Who was dead? The groundhog?”

  “I can’t remember!” Kath shrieked.

  Then her mouth drew down into that terrified bow, and her face began to twitch, and the twitch spread, becoming a coarse trembling that curled through her body like a wave.

  Oh, Jesus she’s going to seizure again!

  But he held her, clutched her, and the crisis passed. A few moments later, when her face relaxed and then frowned with tears, the nurse who’d rushed into the room at the sound of Kath’s screams left Scott alone to comfort her.

  “I can’t remember, Daddy,” Kath said. “I can’t remember.”

  And Scott rocked her and held her and told her it was all right, it didn’t matter. Sometime later he lay her back in bed and she slept, one arm wrapped lovingly around Jinnie.

  PART THREE

  29

  SCOTT PULLED THE RENTED Pinto to a stop at the mouth of the farmer’s long gravel drive and gazed at the sagging gray clapboard that had once been white. Flanking the house on either side, weather-blackened outbuildings stood peacefully rotting. Beneath a huge old oak in an adjoining pasture, cattle clustered in groups against the drizzle that was falling.

  The farm had been easy enough to find. Holley’s directions had been clear, and the name on the mailbox, handpainted in large black letters, had been legible from a hundred yards away. The question was—and it struck Scott now, as he tried to imagine what he was going to say to Clayton Barr, the man whose timely intervention had saved Kath’s life: What was he doing here in the first place?

  The truth was, he had no idea. He hadn’t a clue what he meant to say to Mr. Barr, apart from offering his thanks, and he didn’t know what he expected to find later, when he planned to drive out to the scene of the accident. He knew only that he was here, that he had needed to get away from the hospital, from Holley and his forms that needed signing, and from the unseen presence of a corpse that belonged to Krista. He told Holley he wanted the farmer’s address so he could take a run out here and thank the man before leaving for Canada, and of course he was being sincere....

  Come on, an inner voice urged. You know why you’re here.

  Scott removed the drawings from the pocket of his shirt, the same shirt he’d been living and sleeping in for the past two days, and carefully unfolded them.

  Yes, he supposed he did know why he was here and not back at the hospital, Making the Necessary Arrangements. It was these damned drawings, and the nagging questions their existence posed.

  He glanced at the drawings and felt deeply cold.

  Something struck the Volvo’s windshield, that much was certain. It was the only explanation for the glass inside the car. It might have been something as simple as a flying rock or the jutting branch of a tree, but Scott had found no evidence of either in the car. The same was true of a large animal, another cow, maybe—no evidence. No hoof-scrapes on the hood, no tufts of fur hooked on to the jagged edges of the windshield, no dark gouts of animal blood.

  But it was the cartoon tombstone that ate at Scott’s mind like an ulcer. When he’d first seen the drawings in Ottawa, he’d discounted all but the obviously pertinent details: the car that was clearly a Volvo and the woman and child inside. In the first few hours after speaking with Holley, he recalled only dimly the uncomprehending shock he’d felt when the coroner told him the Volvo had struck a fence surrounding a cemetery. Then, in the coroner’s ill-lit office, the knowledge struck him like a rabbit punch, but one dealt to a man already senseless and bleeding on the mat. Only later, sitting in Holley’s Mercedes in front of the Texaco station, did the knowledge really begin to work on him, but even then the thought process was suspended by Kath’s abrupt recovery.

  But last night, sitting awake in ICU, the whole thing began a sluggish distillation through his mind. That the Volvo had in reality struck a fence surrounding a cemetery brought up the blackly fascinating possibility that the cemetery in the drawing was the one at Hampton Meadow, the same one against whose boundary Krista met her death. And that dragged Scott’s attention almost obsessively to the tombstone, to the inscription which was indecipherable save for three or four enticingly legible letters.

  Was there one like it at Hampton Meadow? And if so, then... what? And how had the accident happened? Why were no answers forthcoming? Holley’s proffered explanations—that Krista had fallen asleep at the wheel or that she had simply lost control of the car while speeding—were patently inadequate in view of the fragments of glass inside the car. Scott knew Krista liked to drive fast, but he couldn’t believe she’d been negligent, not with Kath in the car. And the possibility of any significant mechanical malfunction had been dispelled by the police mechanics.

  Now, even more than the crippling fact of Krista’s death, not knowing how it happened rattled with a vexing insistence in his mind. Was there a clue hidden in the drawings? As far as Scott was concerned, the Cartoonist’s credibility was not to be doubted. The old man’s grotesquely recorded predictions had been right on the money so far. And as long as there was a chance the drawings could tell him more, Scott felt compelled to follow it up.

  By dawn this morning, following another sleepless night, he had known exactly what he must do. He woke Kath briefly, just to be sure he could, then made his way out to the lobby. After a little persuading, the switchboard operator loaned him a long-range beeper, and made a note of his instruction that he be notified of even the slightest change in his daughter’s condition. He took a cab to a downtown Hertz outlet, rented the Pinto...and now he was here.

  Scott replaced the drawings in his pocket, dropped the car into gear and started up the puddled gravel drive.

  The trip out here from the hospital had possessed a dreamy sort of quality. For a while as he drove Scott found himself grinning and imagining—no, actually believing—that he was twenty-five again, heading for Krista’s place in Sandy Point, to pick her up and take her down to the beach, to their private spot, where he would hold her and kiss her and stroke her pregnant belly, and beg her to give him another chance. The past several hours seemed muddy, the product of some weird psychedelic drug. Yeah. Maybe that was it. A bad trip. Somebody, maybe the stew on the Montreal-Boston flight, had slipped a tab of acid into his drink.

  As he crunched into the dooryard, an illusion of a similar clapboard in Newfoundland materialized before his eyes, and for a shimmering moment Scott expected to see Krista burst smiling through the doorway, arms flung wide in greeting....

  But a stooped, wary-eyed man appeared where Krista should have been and the illusion misted into drab reality. A gaggle of geese, dirty white in the drizzle, scattered as the man strode across the unmowed lawn. He nodded, but the wariness in his eyes sharpened when he noticed Scott’s haggard features. He stopped several paces back from the car, watching as Scott climbed out.

  “Lost?” Clayton Barr said.

  “I don’t think so,” Scott said, curiously aware of his own voice. “I was hoping to talk to Mr. Clayton Barr.”

  “That’d be me,” Clayton said, extending an open hand. Scott accepted the hand and shook it, aware at once of its callused strength. “What can I do for you, Mr.... ?”

  “Bowman,” Scott said, wishing he were someone else. “Scott.”

  Clayton’s face emptied itself of expression, then grew somber, almost pained. He lifted an ar
m as if to encircle Scott’s shoulders, then let it drop again. His eyes, sad, stripped of their former wariness, shifted to a point somewhere beyond the barn.

  “Come on inside, Scott,” he said. “It ain’t a day for standin’ in the yard.”

  Remarking the man’s bowlegged gait and the darker green of his shoulders where the drizzle had soaked through his work shirt, Scott followed him onto the porch. Inside, a big old calico cat lay curled in the hollow of a sagging couch, and an assortment of mud-caked boots lay scattered about. A folded newspaper sat next to a half-drunk bottle of beer on the threadbare arm of an easy chair. Beyond the inner door a radio murmured a torchy country ballad, and, off-key, a girl’s voice hummed along.

  Clayton grabbed the beer. “Set right here,” he said, indicating the chair. He shooed the cat and claimed its spot on the couch. Rusty springs chattered under his weight. “Helen,” he said over the sound of the radio. “Fetch us a couple of cold ones, would you?”

  Scott dropped heavily into the worn easy chair, which still had Clayton’s warmth on it. The pager clipped to his belt dug into his side. Smiling shyly, a homely girl of about eighteen brought the beers onto the porch. Clayton waited for her to leave before speaking.

  “Terrible tragedy, Scott,” he said, leaning forward, picking at the label on his beer. “I know it don’t help, but I believe I know how you feel. I lost my Sally years ago, givin’ birth to Helen in there.” He hooked a thumb toward the kitchen door. “She wasn’t much more than Helen’s age, neither. It hurts, hurts deep, and there’s no words to soften it.” He fell silent for a time, then said: “What brings you out here?”

  Staring into his beer, Scott said, “I wanted to thank you...” But then, desperately, he said, “Can you tell me what happened? What happened to my girls?”

  Clayton took a swig of his beer. “That I can’t tell you, chum. Only what I heard and saw.” He turned his dark eyes out to the yard. “Couldn’t sleep last night, so I was sittin’ out here, right where you are now, havin’ a beer and...thinkin’ about my Sally, I guess. Yeah, thinkin’ about my girl.

  “It was quiet—that’s what struck me. I guess the quiet was what set me to thinkin’ ’bout Sally.” Clayton shifted, the couch springs griping beneath him. “Quiet. I mean, there wasn’t even a cricket singin’. Strange, now I think of it. Just dead silent, ’cept for the odd semi roarin’ by out on Ninety-Five.

  “Then all at once I hear this horn blarin’. Some jackass, I’m thinkin’, one of the Teevens boys out roddin’ around. But this horn keeps right on goin’, and its startin’ to spook the cows.

  “Well, I just ignored it a while, you know. But it went on for ten or fifteen minutes, and I got to thinkin’ maybe there’s been an accident. So I lit out across the south field there and down to Route Five, the way you must’ve come in from the highway, ’cept the other end.

  “I found your car plowed up against the fence, down the hill from the cemetery.” Clayton paused in uneasy reflection. “God’s mercy, I took an awful chill standin’ there in the road lookin’ down at that car, nothin’ movin’, and that horn just a screamin’. I don’t mean to sound like no pansy or nothin’. I mean, I wasn’t afraid of what I’d see. It was a feelin’, that’s all I can say about it...but I wanted to turn tail and run. Somethin’ in the air, I dunno. A smell. A dead smell, but old dead. Know what I mean?”

  Scott said nothing—but he thought of the smell around Krista’s corpse, and the similar stench in the car.

  “Ended up talkin’ to myself out there,” the farmer said. “‘Come on, Clay,’ I says to myself. ‘Get your ass down there. Suppose somebody’s hurt?’”

  “Was there anything around?” Scott said. “Anything they might have hit? A big animal...anything?”

  “Well, I did see somethin’, or I thought I did—a cloud took the moon just then—shiftin’ around in the graveyard.”

  “What was it?” Scott said, his voice raised and a little menacing. “What did you see?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Every once in a while somebody’s cows get out and they turn up in the boneyard, grazin’ on the parish grass—”

  “Well, what did it look like?” Scott pressed.

  The wariness stole back into Clayton’s eyes. “I can’t say, chum. It might’ve been an animal, or a shadow, or just my beery imagination.”

  Or a man, Scott thought, remembering the drawings. Could they have hit a man? It seemed unlikely. If they had, where was he now? Surely no one could have survived such a collision.

  Clayton took a long, gurgling pull on his beer, stalling to see if Scott had anything more to say. But Scott’s eyes had gone glassy again, distant and reflective.

  “Your wife was already gone,” Clayton said. “God rest her soul. And your girlie, well, she was moanin’ and...” He cut off in midsentence, dropping his gaze to the ratty-eared tom twining in and out between his legs.

  “And what, Mr. Barr?”

  “Well, she was moanin’ and sort of starin’-like, with her mouth open and kind of twisted, as if she was screamin’ but no sound was comin’ out.”

  Scott knew the expression.

  He started to push to his feet, but his elbow caught his untouched beer and sent it spinning to the floor. Beer boiled out and spread in bubbly-yellow fingerlets. Scott remained frozen in mid-motion, a Polaroid of a man getting out of a chair...or perhaps sitting down in it. He had no idea what he should do.

  “Never mind that,” Clayton said, getting to his feet. “Helen’ll mop it up.”

  “Can you take me there?” Scott said. “To where it happened?”

  “Now?” Clayton said, glancing at his watch. “It’s early for lunch, but we could offer you a bite... There’s nothin’ out there for you, chum.”

  Scott turned to the door. “Thanks, no, Mr. Barr,” he said, and started out through the drizzle. “I’ll find it myself.”

  “Turn right at the end of the lane,” Clayton called after him.

  But the car was already rolling out of the yard.

  30

  HAMPTON MEADOW CEMETERY OCCUPIED an acre of hilly ground about a half-mile east of Clayton Barr’s entryway. Finding it easily, Scott pulled off the road and parked in front of the wrought-iron gates. Before stepping out into the light caul of rain, he removed the drawings from his pocket and carefully unfolded them.

  The westbound continuation of the road followed a sweeping curve for several hundred yards, then banked up sharply and out of sight beyond a low, hunchbacked hill. Keeping to the shoulder, Scott moved slowly toward that hill. Even from this distance he could see the deep gouges in the dirt where the Volvo left the pavement. Skid marks like black ribbons curved into view from beyond the hill, overlapped, then opened again as they angled off to the shoulder. As he drew closer, Scott could see where the car struck the wall; crumbled wafers of stone lay scattered about. There were no trees near the damaged section of fence, no low-slung branches to explain the Volvo’s inwardly shattered windshield.

  Skidding on the rain-slicked grass, Scott descended the steep embankment to the ditch. Something down there had caught his eye, a steely glint beneath a trough of stagnant water. Reaching in, he retrieved a section of molding that belonged to the Volvo. The water was foul and his hand came away smelling as if he’d dipped it into a cesspool.

  He dropped the molding and scaled the opposite bank. Then, breathing heavily, he stepped over the fieldstone fence and made his way into the graveyard.

  As he ventured more deeply into it, the initially orderly cemetery became a mishmash of scattered memorials, a sizable proportion of which were little more than square granite plaques laid flat in the earth. It appeared the grounds back here, with the exception of a few individually cared-for sites, were untended. Almost unconsciously, Scott avoided stepping on the actual burial plots. His mother had warned him against that when he was still quite young, and since then it had always bothered him in a vaguely superstitious way to do so.

  Now he ascended an
easy grade, pausing beneath a gnarled, leafless tree providing little shelter from the rain. Beyond the grade, in the contour of a shallow, monument-studded basin, a woman in black sat on her haunches before a sand-colored marker. She was rocking and weeping, making a wretched sound that reached Scott’s ears in wavering bursts. A soggy wreath of summer flowers lay atop the freshly sodded plot.

  Grief, he thought. Black grief.

  The rain tapered off as he gazed at the woman’s back, and the air grew colder; Scott could see the vapor of his breath. Chilled, he eased down the opposite face of the incline, veering away from the mourner until he could no longer hear the loonlike quality of her wails. He was dragging his feet instead of lifting them...and yet he was possessed by an awful, badgering restlessness.

  Krista, he thought despondently. Dear Krista...

  In that instant Scott stopped short, the feeling of eyes on his back a physical thing. He wheeled around sharply, his legs now almost magically light, muscles taut, ready to bolt—

  But there was nothing there. Only that dead, wretched tree, cresting the rise, poking dragon fingers into the swirling slate of the sky. Nothing but a stupid tree....

  Something ice-cold slipped beneath Scott’s hide and spread like ripples on a pond. He clutched the drawings in both hands, tearing the page along a soggy fold-line, his gaze running giddily to the frame with the leafless tree stamped black against a cotton-white moon When he looked up again, his eyes were round with disbelief.

  The tree in the drawing was identical to the one in front of him. Every branch, every twist, every knot.

  His balance betraying him, Scott scanned from landscape to drawing and back again, comparing, mentally photographing, shifting from side to side and then front to back, a surveyor lining up markers in proper perspective. Now he edged backwards at a gradual angle, squinting into the dreary geography before him, matching it to the sketch, to the frame with the tombstone a slanted silhouette in the foreground. The tree was shown from farther back...and there, off to the right, a partially ruined section of wall.