No Way Home

by Andrew Coburn

“You could’ve asked me to do it.”

  “You might’ve shot anybody in sight,” Morgan said and turned left onto a street vaulted by maple trees. Mailboxes stood on posts meshed in ivy. MacGregor stared through the windshield with violent concentration.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Nowhere,” Morgan said and went left at a fork. The road narrowed and curved past the Girl Scout camp and straightened as it approached Paget’s Pond, which lay flat and undisturbed some five miles from the center of town. It was where he and his wife used to take winter walks with their dog, a shepherd Elizabeth swore was wolf. Certainly the size of the animal and the blunt shape of the nose were lupine, but the rest was gentleness. Morgan slowed, swerved, and parked near the pond.

  “You’re right, this is nowhere,” MacGregor said, which irked Morgan, but only for a moment.

  They left the car, followed a path, and sat opposite each other at a weathered picnic bench in sight of a No Swimming sign. The air tasted of new needles on the pines. A haze blurred half the pond, which Morgan fancied as the juncture between now and then. He said, “I thought you might’ve come up with something by now.”

  “You mean something I done could’ve pissed somebody off?” MacGregor crimped his brow. “Nothing big. Only little things.”

  “Tell me about ‘em.”

  MacGregor’s voice was an official drone. He had dispersed nighttime gatherings of youths drinking beer behind Pearson Grammar School, rousted couples making out in the cemetery, busted the Barnes boy for possession of marijuana, threw a hammerlock on Lester Winn, who was beating on his wife again, and just the other day … “You listening, Chief?”

  Morgan was watching two squirrels, one pursuing the other. A breeze loosened the cooler air roosting in the pines and brought down stray needles. “Just the other day what?”

  “I ticketed Thurman Wetherfield for speeding. If he hadn’t given me lip, he’d have got only a warning.”

  Wetherfield was a firefighter feigning disability and cheating his estranged wife out of proper child support. For a mere second Morgan considered the duplicity of the man’s character, its two thin sides. Then he watched the sun return and spread a net over the pond. As a boy he had skimmed stones here. No Swimming the sign said, but he had swum. “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but it was more than a month ago — that hot day in late April, remember, got to be eighty.”

  “Broke a record,” Morgan said, remembering the day well, especially the afternoon in the prideful home of the Bowmans, where casement windows overlooked a swimming pool and Arlene Bowman’s terry robe opened on two estimable legs certain to coerce him into a state. He had suspected she was trouble, but at the time it hadn’t mattered. “Tell me about that thing with Junior Ray ball.”

  “Hell, that was more than a month ago. I told you about it.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “I responded to a call from the high school,” MacGregor said with elbows planted on the table. He gave Morgan a picture of girls in sweaty T-shirts competing on the playing field, kicking a ball from one end to the other, their school letters undulating across their young chests and the sun shimmering off their healthy legs. The snake in the grass was Junior Ray ball, undersized and unemployable, who had been warned in the past. Teachers had shooed him away. “This time he had his pants off,” MacGregor said. “He was in the weeds on the sidelines, thought he couldn’t be seen.”

  “You chased him.”

  “Ran him down,” MacGregor said, giving Morgan an image of Junior flopping breathlessly on the ground like a caught fish gulping air when it wanted water. “Grabbed him by the scruff and gave the girls a laugh. Marched him bare-ass back to his pants while he kept his hand over his dicky.”

  “You didn’t bring him in.”

  “Didn’t see the sense. Figured he learned his lesson.”

  “Still think that?”

  “I know what you’re getting at, Chief, but I think you’re stretching. Where would a poor little bastard like Junior Rayball get an F-l sniper’s rifle? And where would he get the guts?” An expression of pain, frustration, and relief passed simultaneously over MacGregor’s face. “I’ve got to be honest with you, I’m not at all convinced the shooting has anything to do with me.”

  “Nor am I,” said Morgan, gazing at pine tops glued into the sky. A pink spider no bigger than a pinhead, the sort that occupies lilies, was crawling on the picnic table. MacGregor spotted it and was about to squash it with a finger. “Let it live,” Morgan said.

  He drove MacGregor back to Miss Westerly’s house, where for a single second they glimpsed Lydia’s face in a window. It could have been a length of bone. MacGregor flinched as if the shadow of a hand had passed over him. “I feel like I’m losing her,” he said without inflection.

  “I want you to stay with her, Matt. You’re the best one to get her through this.”

  “What if she says no?”

  “Tell her you’re under orders.”

  “She looks through me, Chief. Honest to God, like I’m not there.”

  “I know, Matt. I’m worried too.”

  MacGregor slid out of the car like a man on a mission, but took only a couple of steps and looked back. “What are you going to do, Chief?”

  Morgan put a scrambling hand into his hair and scratched a nonexistent itch. “I don’t know. Maybe just drive around and think.”

  • • •

  After three days of financial business in New York, none of it particularly satisfactory, Calvin Poole shuttled from LaGuardia to Logan and then rode in a limo to his home in the exclusive Oakcrest Heights section of Bensington, where prime woodland had been cleared for estate properties with great sweeps of lawn and varying flourishes of architecture, from Tudor and Georgian to Swiss chalet and California modern. Poole’s was mock Tudor.

  He was disappointed and inordinately annoyed when the cleaning woman told him that Mrs. Poole was out. He liked people in their rightful setting at the proper time. His life was bound to routine and security and to the hope that his investments were sound and the world was as it should be.

  Upstairs in the master bedroom, he was glad to be home. On his flight to Boston he had suffered from a nervous stomach, and in the limo he had failed to relax. With pleasure he got out of his pinstripes and slipped off his shoes. He had an austere face and a straight figure. Golf was his game. Tennis used to be. His first wife had died of an aneurysm on the court.

  In his shirttails he went to the wide window to breathe in the scented air. Gossamer clung to the sunshine that hung over the goldfish pond, and wood notes came out of a birch, a relief after the noise-filled heat of New York, where he had eaten too well at the Princeton Club while conferring with colleagues from distant points of the nation. He was president of the Mercury Savings & Loan in Boston, named after the god of money. His best money years had been a string of recent ones when a fool was in the White House. His contributions had helped put him there.

  He deposited his cuff links on the dresser, folded his necktie in two to put away later, and stripped off his shirt. The intelligent eyes of his second wife gazed at him out of a photograph. The marriage was the sort in which each strove to blur the hues of the other and shade in something much different. The rub was that the outline of the old bled through the shading of the new.

  By the bed he skinned off his high black socks, vigorously scratched a calf, and stepped on something chill, a nickel. Near it was another. Crouching, he traced an exploring hand over the carpet, probed beneath the fringes of the bedspread, and dragged up a snatch of bright orange material he first thought belonged to his wife. Seconds passed before he realized with cold certainty that the article was a man’s.

  He shoved it back under the bed and straightened, his heart pounding. On naked feet he stepped first here and then there, faltering each time, as if the room had altered. Things seemed no longer in their familiar frames, or he in his proper body. His flesh crawled. The wall m
irror over his wife’s dresser reduced him to a skimpy undershirt and white boxer shorts with a telltale stain. Having survived the utter despair that came with the loss of one wife, he was in no way confident he could survive the loss of another. He was sixty years old. Moving from the mirror, he struggled for composure by forcibly setting his face hard, as if revealing too much emotion about anything, even in private, was poor taste and bad business.

  Moments later his head popped out of a colorful polo shirt with an alligator emblem over the breast pocket. Light poured through his rise of white hair, which he patted down. When he plunged a foot into a pair of cotton slacks a noise started up in his head, haunting at first, then mocking. He likened it to an echo from an ancestral cave.

  He was in his high-ceilinged study with a snifter of brandy when his wife returned. He heard her exclaim something about a shooting to the cleaning woman, then unload her parcels on the foyer table. He set the snifter aside when she entered the study. “Darling,” she said, “you’re home.”

  “Yes,” he said and kissed her.

  • • •

  “Hope I’m not disturbing you,” Chief Morgan said when Doris Wetherfield answered the doorbell with pins in her mouth. She was a seamstress working out of her home, her specialty bridal gowns, though alterations and repairs were her bread and butter. The new zipper on Morgan’s fly was hers.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, the pins removed. “Why aren’t you working on that horrible business with the Laphams?”

  “The state police are on the job. They’re the pros.”

  “Then what are you getting paid for?” she said with a wink. Her hair was a cushion resting lopsided on her head. Her face was angular, her neck long, and the rest of her was a lank line. Her children numbered five, one attending a community college and the rest in lower grades.

  “Is Thurman in?” he asked, and her eyes sprang.

  “You know damn right well he doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “I thought you might tell me where he is living.”

  “With some woman or other, who knows? Who cares? What d’you want him for? What’s he done, besides not providing for his family?”

  “Nothing that I know of,” Morgan said, aware that despite gross injustices she remained a loyal wife. He rearranged his feet on the step. “I was wondering if Thurman does any hunting.”

  “Hunting? Thurman? What are you talking about?”

  “Does he own a rifle?”

  “Christ, no. He doesn’t own any kind of a gun.” Her eyes, red from her work, turned suspicious. “Why’d you ask me that?”

  Her breathing rose, his did too. He wished he had not asked her anything, for he was frightening her with a suspicion so flimsy he had merely wanted to blow it from his mind. His eyes shifted as hers dug in.

  “Look here, Chief, he might be a worthless shit, but he’s no God-damn killer.”

  “I know that,” he said, aware of a flow of air carrying the sweetness of trees. A hawk threaded the sky.

  “Then why’d you come here?”

  “I shouldn’t have.” His eyes returned to her. “But something like this happens, you check everybody.”

  The fright left her face, anger remained. “Next time you need your fly fixed, see somebody else.”

  “Accept my apology, Doris.”

  “Too late for that,” she said and shut the door on him.

  He returned to his car, radioed the station, and told Meg O’Brien where he was but not where he was going. He drove north, away from old-fashioned front porches with fluted columns to a meandering rural road, where wood-heated houses stood prone to fatal fires. The last one, three years before, had taken two lives. He drove toward the edge of town, where the woods were dense, birds their loudest. Approaching a battered mailbox, he slowed the car. Nailed to a tree was a crudely hand-painted sign: bikes repaired.

  This is where he should have come in the first place, he was convinced of it.

  He ran his car into the woods along a gravel road that petered out fast. In a clearing was a frame house surrounded by weeds, stumps, and the carcasses of cannibalized bicycles. Raspberry canes flourished around an abandoned oil drum. Beyond the clearing was a vista of swamp and dead trees, lovely to look at, but Morgan did not let his eye linger. He climbed out of the car, careful where he stepped. Poison ivy was rife.

  This was the womanless home of the Ray balls, Papa and Junior. The elder son, Clement, was in parts unknown.

  Papa Ray ball’s pickup truck was nowhere around, and the small frame house, the roof in need of repair, looked lifeless. A dirt path led to loose steps, which under Morgan’s weight creaked out a dark music. No one answered his knock.

  He peered through a clouded window and glimpsed a refrigerator, a metal-top table, and a stove that stood on legs. Wall pegs accommodated coats, jackets, and caps left over from winter. Moving to the side of the house, avoiding the rusted blade of a shovel that had lost its handle, he peered through another window, this one raised atop its screen. This was Junior’s room, he was sure, and he stepped away with an impression of must, mildew, and unaired bedding.

  Making water near a woodpile, he felt the solitude of the place tighten around him. He returned to his car, sat in it with the window lowered, and watched a squirrel mount a stump and strip the scales from a pine cone. Dropping his head back, he decided to wait. Unarmed, he wondered whether he dare close his eyes.

  • • •

  Papa Rayball fought the heartless Boston traffic into the depths of the city and parked the pickup on a side street whose failure was reflected in shabby store windows. Papa slipped out first, then came Junior, who was eyed by black youths wearing head rags, sleeveless tops, and cutoff jeans. Junior stuck close to his father and whispered, “Bet they’re on dope.”

  “Keep your eyes straight ahead,” Papa growled.

  “They might steal the truck.”

  Papa shook his head. “Soon as they see where we’re goin’, they won’t bother it.”

  Crossing the sun-glazed street, father and son cast short shadows. Papa was pint-size and Junior no bigger. In his early sixties, Papa was knobby and gnarled and had combustible blue eyes that smoldered in his face. His hair was the dead head of a dandelion exploding into dust. Though he could not readily see it, Junior was his spit and image.

  They entered a small hotel squeezed between larger buildings. The lobby was miniature and dimly lit, and the smell of disinfectant stirred in Junior a distant memory that did not quite emerge. The desk clerk, an extremely fat man with a pink face, greeted Papa with a knowing smile. “Figured you were due.”

  “Two rooms,” Papa said. “This is my boy.”

  The clerk pushed the register forward. “Certainly, Mr. Richmond.”

  “That ain’t our name,” Junior said.

  Papa frowned, and the clerk smiled. “How old are you, son?”

  “Twenty-four,” Junior said, picking nervously at his sleeve. He had on a denim jacket splashed with decals. Papa signed the register for both of them and paid out the money in grubby tens, fives, and ones, creating a little pile. The clerk produced keys attached to plastic tags. Junior whispered, “You ain’t never took me here before.”

  “This place cost more.” Papa winked at the clerk. “I usually take him to Lawrence. It’s quicker.”

  “We got quality here,” the clerk said, his eyes skidding to Junior. “Gals that will teach you something.”

  “Don’t give him somebody’s gonna scare him to death.”

  “We aim to please,” the clerk said and gripped the telephone with a padded hand.

  Their rooms, one next to the other, were down a narrow corridor on the second floor. The women arrived within five minutes. Papa’s woman rode in on the waft of her own un-subtle cologne, and right away he liked the cut of her. Her hair dangled in braids like metallic coils, and her skin was burnt almond. He frowned to cover his excitement.

  “What’s your name?”

 
“Is that important?” she said.

  “Wouldn’t have asked, would I?” With his pants off, he had the hind legs of a dog, but the strut of a peacock.

  “Inez.”

  “Sounds foreign,” he said and with gimlet eyes watched her undress. Her body outshone all others in his memory.

  “I’m homegrown, my little man. Homegrown.”

  Some twenty minutes later, from the bed, he pounded the wall and shouted through it. “How you doin’ in there, Junior?” When he got no answer, he pounded it again, with vigor.

  “We ain’t started yet,” Junior called back in a voice that did not sound wholly his.

  “For Christ’s sake, time’s runnin’ out. Don’t waste it.” Papa turned back to the woman, trailing a knobby hand over the smart curve of her abdomen. “I got another son ain’t like that one at all.”

  Junior cried through the wall. “I’m gettin’ there!”

  A half hour later, father and son made their way along the corridor to the stairs. Junior, invigorated, hooked a thumb into the waist of his jeans and, swinging his free arm, imitated his father’s gait. “I ain’t ever had a black gal before.”

  “Black, white, it don’t make no dif’rence,” Papa said, stopping at the stairs and patting his pockets to make sure he had not left anything behind. “Long’s you get it off.”

  “You ever bring Clement here?”

  “Clement didn’t need to be brought.”

  “Maybe I can bring myself sometime.”

  Papa’s eyes flared. “You can’t never bring yourself nowhere. Look what you did at the high school. Let yourself be made a God-damn fool of.”

  “I know, Papa.”

  “No, you don’t know. Shit like that the chief uses against me, always has.”

  “Me that done it, Papa. Not you.”

  “That don’t matter to him. Come on, let’s go!”

  They descended to the lobby, where once again the smell of disinfectant almost awakened something in Junior. The fat desk clerk was eating pizza and did not look up. In their path was a man trying to pass as a woman, his face hyperbolized with abundant paint and lipstick. Stiletto heels scraped the carpetless floor. The voice carried the rhythmic cadence of a Haitian.