The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of

by Joseph Hansen

  “It happened to a lot of us,” Dave said.

  “You were younger,” Smith said. “I was already forty. I told myself, ‘I have to do what I want to do. It’s now or never. I’m going to paint.’”

  “Good for you,” Dave said.

  “Bad for me,” Smith said. “You don’t choose painting. Painting chooses you.” The new drink was hitting him hard. Choose came out shoes. And he was teetery on the nail-keg stool. “I didn’t know that simple and profound fact. And my ignorance cost me everything—wife, kids, savings, house, car, health, everything.” He gripped the edge of the tabletop and leaned at Dave. “And for what? One-man shows in backstreet galleries in towns like Santa Maria, Laguna, Flagstaff. At first. Then a few paintings hanging up to fade in tourist shops. Marked down, marked down again. Lessons to bored housewives without talent.” He lifted his glass again and smiled at it wanly. “And booze. No, it didn’t help me figure out what was wrong. It helped make figuring out what was wrong unnecessary.”

  He drank, this time thirstily, and when he set the glass down all that was left in it were ice cubes. He peered at Dave in the deepening shadows under the low rafters.

  “But it cost too much. I’d had apartments, then rooms, then rooms in the houses of friends who didn’t stay friends long. Then I was sleeping on the beach. And then I was too sick to get up. Hospitals after that. Out sometimes but too sick to work and there was only one cure for the frustration. Booze. Then hospitals again. Veterans’ hospitals. Free. Nothing free in this world worth a damn having, my friend. Remember that.”

  Smith belched. His eyes fell shut. Past him, the sinking sun cast the shadows of the gulls on the window glass. Dave finished his own drink. When he looked up from it, Smith was watching him. Smith looked at the drink Dave hadn’t tasted. Dave pushed it across to him.

  “Thank you,” Smith said. “There was a period when I took fright. I quit drinking. I did my work. Taught at an art institute in Pasadena. There was an article in a national magazine that praises every rotten artist they write about anyway. It sold enough prints of my stuff to buy me a house trailer to keep out the wintry winds. Place to sleep dry. Wheels to wander on. I quit the institute and wandered, painting boring pictures of boring subjects in a boring style. And knew it and couldn’t help it and bought a case of vodka and nearly killed myself.”

  He drank half of Dave’s drink.

  “Not ropes and knives and bullets. Unintentionally. Starvation, dehydration, old age.” The teeth rattled like dead men’s bones. “On the beach at Monterey. When Mona found me. Knew who I was, had been. Took me in, fed me, got me on my feet again. Gave me a little room at the back of her gallery, let me work for my keep. Hell, it wasn’t much. Sweep every day, put up a nail now and then, screw in a light bulb, water the plants out front, frame some tourist’s lousy seascape once in a while.

  “She said if I’d paint when I was strong again, she’d give me a show. Place did a middling business. Pretty setting—not heaven, but more than I deserved. I knew that. I pulled myself together and tried to work again. Shook too much. Had to drink to get the shakes down to where I could draw a line, hold a brush. But there was some point to working now—to pay Mona back. She kept the bottle, doled out the drinks, and slowly the pictures got done. Best I ever did. Can’t account for it.” Smith shook his head in wonderment. “I started seeing things like I’d never seen them before. I got them down on paper that way. All I needed was time.” He scowled. “Then that big bullneck cop blundered in and wrecked it. Love!” He choked on the word. “The woman is almost forty. Love is a swindle. Grown man is supposed to know that. Not him. Gray-haired, overweight, father of grown children, for God’s sake. But from that first minute, it was candlelight and gypsy violins all the way. Sickening.”

  “Ben Orton,” Dave said.

  “I raise my glass”—Smith had trouble locating it and getting his fingers around it but he managed at last to hoist it at a dangerous tilt, ice cubes rattling—“to the little woman that killed that loudmouth yahoo. With only one reservation.” He drank from the glass, set it down with a bang that didn’t mean anything except bad aim, brushed at his mouth with a limp hand. “She waited too long.”

  “Who?” Dave asked.

  But Smith’s attention had slipped. He had lowered his chin to tabletop level and was sliding his hands toward the glass like a kid trying to catch a sitting toad. He sighted on the glass one-eyed. He smiled. The hands closed—but next to the glass, not on it. He made a noise, sat straight, and with no trouble at all picked up the glass and drank from it. And fell off the stool. It was a noisy fall. The stool went over too and the glass broke.

  “What the hell?” the bartender said.

  “It’s all right,” Dave said. He knelt beside the rickety old man. He had hit his head. The teeth had jumped out and lay glistening pink on the planks. He didn’t seem any more alive than they were. Dave felt for the beat of life in the crooked blue vein of his scraggy neck. It was there. He lifted the old head. It felt eggshell-fragile in his hand. Smith opened his eyes.

  “His wife,” he said, “plump little blond.”

  “Never mind that now,” Dave said. “Are you all right?”

  “Drunk as hell.” Smith grinned, looked panicked, covered his mouth. “Teeth. Where my teeth?” He pushed at Dave feebly, rolling his eyes at the planks. He snatched up the teeth, rubbed them on his jacket, made a horrible, gaping face and set them back in place. He struggled to get up. Dave helped him. Smith stared down at the shattered glass, the clean curved edges glittering in the ruddy light “Shame,” he said. “Awful waste.”

  “You’ve had enough. Let’s get you out of here.” Dave began to help Smith down the stairs. He was light to manage, bones like sticks, no flesh on them to speak of. And he didn’t quarrel with being helped. He let it happen. The twisted stairs were narrow and both of them jarred the rails and got their legs tangled but Smith went on talking.

  “She had a little revolver. Hoo, was she mad!”

  “What revolver?” The bartender put a foot on the steps and reached up to help. “Who’s got a revolver?”

  “No one here,” Dave said. “It’s all right. I have him.” They reached floor level. Smith pulled free of him, poking into pockets again, muttering. “Tip the man.”

  “All I want from you,” the bartender said, “is for you to get lost.” He waved a puff-sleeved arm at windows that showed the sunset people at the candlelit tables. “Go fall off the deck over there.”

  “Where does he live?” Dave asked. “Do you know?”

  The bartender squinted. “What are you—a Boy Scout?”

  “It’s a small town,” Dave said. “Wherever it is can’t be far out of my way.”

  The bartender went back to his bottles. “Take the road that cuts off at the school. You’ll hit a big stand of eucalyptus. Other side of that, he’s got a trailer. Goddam eyesore. Ought to be a law.”

  Mumbling, Smith fell toward the bar, waving a twenty-dollar bill. Dave caught him in mid-fall, swung him around, steered him toward the door, taking the bill out of his hand and tucking it back into his pocket. Outside, diners looked up briefly, looked down again embarrassed. Except for two. They stared. One was Mona Windrow in a white knitted shawl, the other was Al Franklin in a new denim leisure suit, beard trimmed, long hair clubbed back, nails showing no trace of motor grease. Mona Windrow pushed back her chair and started to rise, distress in her eyes, pity. He reached across and stopped her. Then they both recognized Dave. He nodded to them. Mona Windrow didn’t return the nod. She was looking reproach at Franklin. But Franklin nodded. As Dave guided the unseeing Smith past them, Franklin even spoke. “Evening.” It didn’t mean much but it didn’t quite mean nothing.

  In the rental car, slumped askew in the bucket seat, safety strap bunching up the linen jacket, head bumping the window glass, hands fallen to his lap palms-up in a gesture of emptiness, eyes shut, Smith still couldn’t stop talking. “She’d really worked herself up,
shaky hands, squeaky voice. Told him she’d kill him if he didn’t leave Mona alone.” Smith made a sour sound, opened blurry eyes, turned his head to wince at the flicker of hard red light through the ragged tree trunks. “Wasted her chance with words. She should have pulled that trigger. He knew her better than she knew herself, walked up to her, took away the gun, told her he’d do as he damn pleased and if she didn’t like it, she could leave him.” Smith snorted. “He knew she never would.”

  The bartender had been right. The trailer was an eyesore. Dented aluminum, spattered with dried mud, a square of rain-stained cardboard where a window had been, it hung on a weedy point of land above jagged black rocks the tide was backing away from. Three respectable-looking campers kept their distance, sheltering at the edge of the trees. There was a lone telephone booth. From wooden poles with tin meter boxes limp wires fed electricity to the campers and trailer. Smith had passed out. Dave opened the old man’s door, undid the safety strap, and hauled him to his feet.

  The inside of the trailer was a shambles of crumpled drawings, pizza tins, wrappers. Dave lowered Smith onto a bunk heaped with dirty clothes and dirtier blankets. Museum prints of Cézanne apples and Hokusai insects were pinned up over it, faded, flyspecked. Smith began to snore. Turning away, Dave bumped a portable television set. About to shut the trailer door after him, he saw Smith struggle up to switch the machine on. Color splashed the soiled white suit before he collapsed on the bunk again. No sound came from the set. The sound came from Smith.

  “Long as his wife knew anyway, Orton wanted his mistress someplace he didn’t have to drive half the night to get to. He paid for the move, lease on the patio place. Nothing too good for Mona. And that so-called brother of hers.” Smith chuckled. Lecherously. “Brother! I emptied the wastebaskets. I saw letters he wrote to her. Those weren’t from any brother. Hottest stuff you ever read. Worth keeping.”

  “Franklin?” Dave asked.

  He didn’t get an answer. He heard a clinking sound he didn’t understand. Then Smith began to snore again. Loud and steady. Dave stepped in and shook him. He didn’t wake. From a glass of green water on the floor the teeth grinned. Dave went out and shut the door.

  11

  SANDBAR ROAD TOOK HIM into marshes. The planks of a wooden bridge rumbled under the hard little car wheels. The bridge crossed an inlet edged and islanded with reeds. The water lay calm and glossed with red from the last light of the sun. Far out on it a rowboat looked lonely. A sign at the end of the bridge read LA CALETA STATE PARK—U.S. WILDFOWL REFUGE. The blacktop veered and went among old live oaks hung with moss. Houses clustered there, half a dozen of them, stucco, low-roofed, bristly with TV antennas, economy cars in the driveways. He parked at the mailbox numbered 310.

  Sand was soft and fine under his shoes as he crossed a yard where some kind of creeping succulent tried to flower before it was buried. Two cars were in this driveway and another in the garage. He pushed the doorbell. On the door someone had mounted a carving of a bird. It was clumsy work but he guessed it was meant to be a sea eagle. That might have been a fish in its claws. The light was poor. He waited on a woven reed mat dyed with flowers, but no one came to let him in.

  He wandered around the side of the house. At the back, lengths of muslin hung on lines stretched between iron clothespoles. The material had a stiff look about it and the patterns were unfinished. He touched a hanging corner. Somebody was trying batik. The sand of the yard sloped down to a sturdy wooden jetty that thrust from clumps of rushes. He walked out on it. The boards were stained with oil. The lines that lay on them were strong and used. There was a red gasoline can stenciled LA CALETA POLICE. Off across the inlet, a flock of ducks made a wide, quick-winged circle and came down splashing. The noise of their voices was harsh in the stillness. A human voice came thinly through, a female voice. “Hello!” Someone waved from the rowboat and it came toward him, the oars shedding drops of red and silver. For what he didn’t know, but he waited.

  The pair of cameras on straps around her neck looked wrong because she wore an antique white dress with plackets and gussets, fringes and lace. It was long and the hem was wet from the bilge that sloshed in the flat bottom of the boat. She was barefoot. Dave crouched and took the painter from her and wound it around a cleat. He helped her up onto the jetty. She didn’t appear to be wearing anything under the dress. She had a lot of pale yellow hair, part of it carelessly pinned up, part hanging loose. She’d put on no makeup. He recognized, but only just, the woman who had touched Jerry Orton’s hand in the funeral film. That one had been neatly groomed and could be mistaken for a college girl. This one had to be years older than her husband.

  “Did you want me?” she said. “I’m Frances Orton.”

  “I wanted Jerry Orton,” Dave said. “Where is he?”

  “Gone off.” She waved a hand toward the ocean. “Fishing with cormorants. In the launch. They put collars on the birds, you know, so they can’t swallow. They burn torches to attract the fish. Romantic.”

  “And illegal,” Dave said.

  She shrugged. “Boys will be boys.” She went off up the sand, tall for a woman and a little ghostly in the dying light and the 1905 dress. Trudging made her hips look heavy. “What did you want? Perhaps I can help.” She paused and fingered the hanging muslin. “Do you know anything about batik? It’s done with wax and dyes, a sort of stenciling. Only it’s not turning out the way it looks in the book.”

  “Wait till it’s finished,” Dave said. “Is there a radio on this launch? It’s important.”

  “On the launch,” she said, “but not here. It’s the police launch.” She pushed open a blue door with seagulls painted on it. “What’s it about?”

  “His father’s death,” Dave said. “I’m from the insurance company.” He gave her a card. “When will he be back?”

  “Oh, not for hours. He doesn’t go on duty again till midnight.” In the dark doorway, she tilted her head. “May I take a message? I look crazy but I’m not. I was a college instructor. That’s how I met Jerry. A crash course in Spanish for police and sheriff’s officers. I fight it but deep down I’m responsible.”

  “It’s complicated,” Dave said.

  She laughed and walked into the house. “Then explain it to me.” A pale shadow, she took off the cameras by their straps and set them somewhere out of his line of sight. “Come in.” She pushed at her hair. “If you think it’s too much for my wandering wits, I’ll write it down.”

  “How well do you know his sister?” He stepped into a room that was the width of the house. The rug was big and shapeless and hand hooked—seagulls again, with clouds and waves this time. A loom, a potter’s wheel, a drawing table took up most of the space, along with a butcher-block bench heaped with lenses and tripods and light meters, yellow boxes of film and printing paper, hanks of bright yarn and earth-color twine, and brushes and paint pots. But in a corner, a Sears Roebuck couch and easy chair in tough blue plaid faced a TV set that held up a terra-cotta sculpture of a leaping porpoise, not very well done. Macrame work hung ragged on the walls. So did a blurred enlargement of a photo of what might have been a gray whale or an overturned and barnacled ship’s hull. “How much of a radical is she?”

  “Oh, that’s only an act to upset her father.” Frances Orton went around a counter crowded with dying house-plants into a shadowy kitchen where beach birds were painted on cupboard doors. “I never knew a girl so desperate for a man’s love.” She bent out of sight and made kitcheny rattles. “Of course, he gave it all to Jerry.”

  “And how did Jerry take it?” Dave asked.

  “For granted.” Her voice echoed hollow from some low cabinet. “As the lucky ones of this world take everything.” She rose again beyond the plants and frowned at him. “Or do you mean his father’s death? That’s what you’re here about. He took that badly. Gods are not supposed to die.”

  “He’s out enjoying himself tonight,” Dave said.

  “With friends very like his father.” She c
ame from the kitchen with a half-gallon glass jug of wine and a pair of lopsided clay mugs. “Men made by his father in his father’s image. Ugh.” She handed Dave one of the mugs. “From my potting period. You can see why I gave it up.” She splashed wine into the mugs and set the jug on the cluttered bench.

  Dave said, “There were other periods, weren’t there? Rug making, wood carving, sculpture?”

  “Stop. You couldn’t begin to name them all.”

  “What did your father-in-law think of them?”

  “And my funny clothes?” She walked away, dragging the wet, sandy hem of the old dress toward the couch. “He ordered me to shape up, and when I ignored him he tried to wreck my marriage.” She dropped onto the couch and tucked up her feet. “You see, when Jerry and I met, I was still reacting against my upbringing. I was the most conventional girl in the world.” She looked at Dave over her shoulder. “Come sit down.”

  He took the easy chair and set the cup on the margin of vinyl tile the seagull rug didn’t cover. He didn’t want the wine. “What kind of upbringing?”

  “Crazy poets and crazier musicians, colored candles stuck in Chianti bottles, suppers out of cardboard boxes from the corner taco stand, drunks and fights, rehearsals till dawn, strangers sleeping in the bathtub, unmade beds and unpaid bills, escapes down midnight freeways in hundred-dollar cars.” She smiled a crooked smile. “Any questions?”