No Way Home

by Andrew Coburn

  “Money never hurts,” he said.

  “When you were little, what did you want most?”

  He glanced off as if he had no recollections, no past. The man battling the newspaper wore a print shirt reminiscent of a commemorative postage stamp, which made him wary. He did not trust people who came across as both ordinary and absurd. “A Lionel train,” he said, “but I never got one.”

  “That’s a shame.” Her voice tried to reach him. “Is it too late?”

  “Ma’am, I can afford to buy a hundred of ‘em.”

  “You’re right,” she said with a fullness of feeling. “It’s too late.”

  He reached over and gave her hand an easy touch. “There was something else I wanted,” he volunteered. “I wanted to live in a tree house, above the world.”

  She brightened. “Now you are above the world, several thousand feet, at least.”

  “That’s right,” he said and finished his drink.

  They parted in New York, where she got off the plane and he stayed on. The man in the print shirt left behind the newspaper, and eventually he gathered it up, straightened the jumbled pages, and began reading. By the time the plane returned to its roost in the air, he was well into the account of an earthquake in another part of the world, the havoc devastating, as if God had unclenched a fist.

  • • •

  Junior Rayball took shortcuts through the woods, skirted wetland where frogs croaked among arrowheads, and took refuge under a tree behind someone’s house during a sudden brief shower that left brilliants in the shrubs and grasshoppers chirping in the grass. On the road, the sun reheating him, he stripped off his denim jacket and walked freer in jeans wearing through the knees. He consulted a watch that lost time and picked up his step at the sight of workmen in a drainage ditch. Eyeing them furtively, he envied their employment. His last job had been at a Lawrence construction site, where he had worked less than a day and was deemed unsuitable. His recompense had been a cap adorned with the logo of the company.

  Ahead lay Tish Hopkins’s farm, which he approached with nostalgia. When Tish had kept cows he once shifted a manure pile for her, shoveling up wet clumps dripping with earthworms disturbed in their reverie. Tish would have given him more chores had Papa not grabbed him by the scruff and told him that no Rayball should shovel shit, especially for no damn woman!

  He flung several long looks at the barn and then began running for no reason other than that Wenson’s ice-cream stand, shaded by willow and oak, was around the bend. The percussion from a car whipping by at an ornery speed threw him off stride, but the maniacal screech of a jay spurred him on. His sneakers pounded the pavement, his hot breath gusted, and his heart beat big. He arrived at Wenson’s with the smell of a small horse that had won a race.

  He stood in a queue of children, big and small, with whom he felt of an age though not an affinity, and he colored deeply when two girls in their high-school years glanced at him knowingly and whispered. When his turn came he produced pocket money Papa had given him and soon, holding it high, was carrying a dripping cone to a bench under an oak where he could sit half hidden in the shade.

  A van swung into the lot, doors slid open, and children crashed into view. Licking strawberry, his favorite flavor, he targeted girls who glittered and memorized this one’s shiny leg and that one’s spirited smile. When a young mother leaned over her child, his eyes became new coins and his ear honed in on the tunefulness of her voice. In his head rose a world of storybook the kind Clement had read to him. Then, detecting a footstep behind him, he stopped breathing.

  “You shouldn’t have run,” Chief Morgan said.

  He was no longer licking the ice cream, nor was he thinking. He was tightening screws and operating on nerves, which put fire in the roots of his hair. He wished he were wearing his cap.

  “I’m not your enemy.”

  The chief’s voice stayed behind him, disembodied. Letting out a whiff of breath, he crossed his ankles. His socks had vanished into his sneakers, where they heated his feet.

  “What were you doing at the cemetery?”

  The melt from the cone trickled over his fingers and down his palm. He let seconds march by before he spoke. “I got the right. My mother’s there.”

  “Not where you were.”

  The cone was glued to his hand. He did not feel well; bubbles rose from his depths, warnings. “I wanted to see what was happenin’,” he murmured.

  “The Laphams are in the ground, Junior, but the dead come back to haunt. I know that for a fact.”

  “That’s a ghost story.”

  “Doesn’t your mother ever come back to you in dreams?”

  “I don’t remember her.”

  “But you dream of her, don’t you?”

  He dreamed of someone but was never sure it was his mother. She never came close enough to touch, never spoke, never showed the full of her face, only the drop of her hair, the same shade as his.

  “I think there’s something you want to tell me. Make it soon, Junior. Longer you wait, worse it will be.”

  “You sayin’ I done somethin’?”

  “That’s for you to say.”

  The voice yanked at him as if he were a dog on a choke collar, and quickly he shook his head. Something in his stomach welled.

  “Eat your ice cream, Junior.”

  He licked hard and sucked the melt from his fingers and lapped his palm. The cone was mush. When he looked over his shoulder the chief was gone.

  • • •

  Calvin Poole looked at his long pinstriped figure in the hall mirror and, stepping closer, focused on his face, especially his lips: thin, almost unrealized, as if they had never whistled a tune. He forced his lips into a smile when he glanced in on his wife, who was on the telephone. She gave a little wave of the hand.

  Upstairs, he entered the master bedroom surreptitiously, as if traces of illicit conversation might be hanging in the air, but found only silence. He loosened his tie with a sense of fatigue, for he had got little rest lately. His head held too many thoughts, each an enemy of sleep. When he unbuttoned his suit jacket and loosened his tie, a small surge of hysteria rose in his breast.

  It passed.

  With his jacket still on, he lay athwart the bed and wondered what forces had brought him to this position in his life. As a youth, a solid student at Phillips Academy, he had read Wordsworth, the world is too much with us, and the line now wheedled back at him with all the irony of the intervening years. Then, unexpectedly, he slipped into a stunning indifference to the shape of his life.

  His eyes closed.

  No more than a few minutes later they fluttered open. Christine was in the room, a blur at first, then a whole person, with hair and face, needs and wants, with a capacity for loyalty as well as for betrayal. She leaned over him.

  “You’re home early,” she said with a strain in her face, as if she were trying to read his eyes. “There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

  He turned his head from the late sun bombarding the windows. He was a white-haired sixty, but once he had been a child with a mother to tuck him in at night and make everything safe. “The real estate market is going rotten,” he said in a voice younger than his years.

  “Certainly it will bounce back,” she offered.

  “It’s a corpse,” he said. “It’s beginning to stink.”

  “Banks usually ride these things out.”

  “We’re eating loans.”

  She unlaced his shoes. “Big ones?”

  “Big enough,” he said. “And maybe a bigger one to come. Bellmore Companies.”

  “Bellmore?” The strain was back in her face. “That’s Gerald Bowman.”

  “Yes,” he said, experiencing a wave of distaste. Another human betrayal, though he blamed himself for that one. He should have been more prudent, more wary about joining the ride to easy riches. He shuddered over the magnitude of the loans to Bellmore and the unsatisfactory response from Bowman.

  “Are you
feeling all right?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She removed his shoes, shiny English leather, and with both hands began rubbing his stockinged feet, first one and then the other, something she had done often with her first husband, he suspected, but until now not with him. “Maybe you should retire,” she said.

  Sympathy, he realized, was what he wanted. It mitigated a sense of abandonment and a deeper one of aloneness. It lifted him slightly. “Who were you talking to on the phone?”

  Her hesitation was the tick of a second. “Bowman’s wife. I’m supposed to have tea with her tomorrow.”

  He was not disturbed, merely curious, for all events in his life now seemed elliptical and vaguely ironic. “I didn’t realize you two were friendly.”

  “I’ll cancel out if you want.”

  “My problems with her husband don’t extend to her.”

  “I’m not keen on going,” she said. “Then why did you agree?”

  She gave a final rub to each foot and straightened. Her expression was tight and defensive. “The woman has a way about her.”

  With no warning, his head heated. He felt his chest constrict and his heart race. His knuckles showed white. He wanted to rise up and accuse her of the worst a wife could do. He wanted to batter her with questions. Who? Why? Why, damn it, why? Then a deeper emotion invaded him, the fear of losing her, the dread of aloneness in his final years.

  “Calvin.” She was leaning over him again, searching. “Are you sure you feel all right?”

  His face gave away nothing, except his needs.

  • • •

  The last of the funeral guests had left Miss Westerly’s house. She was clearing a buffet table, carefully setting aside bone china and relegating ordinary ware for the dishwasher. Outside on the porch Matt MacGregor, itchy and tense in his wool suit, stood close to Lydia Lapham, whose dark glasses raised a barrier, kept him from her. “Just tell me you don’t believe it,” he said.

  “Of course I don’t,” she said. “You didn’t need to ask.”

  “I was pretty mad when you told me you didn’t want to marry me.”

  “I understood.”

  He wanted to be cleansed of suspicion, but her voice, a soap that didn’t lather, failed to reassure. When he attempted to stroke her arm, she winced away. “I’ll always love you,” he said quickly, “no matter what.”

  “Get on with your life, Matt. That’s what I have to do with mine.”

  He wanted to tell of his pain, but hers was greater, which left him impotent, his arms dangling. Helplessly bitter, he said, “Bakinowski had no right questioning me. I’m a cop same as him.” His bitterness hovered between them like an odor plugged raw into air, unabsorbed, ineradicable. “The chief tells me not to worry — trust him, he says. Should I?”

  “Have you ever had reason not to?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you asking me?”

  “It’s like I’m losing everything.”

  Her eyes glided away from him. “You’d better go, Matt. I should be helping my aunt clean up.”

  “Can I kiss you?” he asked and watched her hesitate before yielding up a cheek. “Never mind,” he said and left.

  • • •

  “He was at me, Papa.”

  Papa, scrawny as if screwed together wrong, was taking a shower under a hose rigged up behind the house and equipped with a spray nozzle. He soaped himself vigorously between the legs, raising one knee and then the other. His testicles hung low as if coming loose.

  Junior fidgeted. “Did you hear me?”

  Papa, whose ear had soaked up every word, said, “He’s always gonna be at you. You got my name.” He soaped his penis, which was half hard, its head audacious. His pubic hair was reduced to a few skeins under the overhang of his small potbelly. “What kinda things was he askin’?”

  “He asked if I dreamt about Mama.”

  Papa spat water. “You don’t tell him nothin’!”

  “I didn’t, I swear, but it was like he was lookin’ right in me.”

  “Ain’t nobody can look in your head but me, you hear?”

  “Yes, Papa, but he scared me.”

  “He don’t scare me. He knows I don’t take shit from nobody.” Suds rushed down Papa’s knobby legs, the bubbles iridescent in the sun. A moment later he jumped out of the spray and drained water from an ear with a knock on his head. “I know what he was doin’. He was fishin’, but he didn’t put much of a worm on the hook.”

  “What, Papa?”

  “Nothin’.” He swept up a scrap of cloth that once might have been a towel and began rubbing himself down. “I got news for you, you wanna hear it?”

  “I do.”

  “Clement’s comin’.”

  5

  May Hutchins fed her husband breakfast, packed him a lunch, and sent him out the door without a kiss, which dismayed him. His full, rosy face looked back at her in confusion and hurt. A master electrician, he brought to his blue work clothes the shape of a pigeon and the vulnerability of a lapdog. Lifting his chin, torn from shaving, he said, “Did I do something, May?”

  “You didn’t do anything,” she snapped. She was wrapped in a robe and bedecked in brushes of wire that looked like machinery, all her hair captured in it. “Not a damn thing!”

  “Then what’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter? They buried a piece of me yesterday. They put my best friend under, her husband beside her. That’s what’s the matter. What else do you want to know?”

  After he drove off in his shiny panel truck, she regretted her words, for she hated hurting him, but her grief and anger were overwhelming. In the bathroom she yanked out her curlers and, with venom, ripped a comb through her sprung hair, which was reddish at the ends and gray at the roots. In the bedroom she relinquished her robe for a housedress and gave a passing glance to the frock she had bought on sale at Roberta’s. With a chill she realized she could never show it off to Flo Lapham.

  In the kitchen, minor annoyances got on her nerves to the point of anguish: a cabinet door that would not close properly, an ant in the food cupboard, a recurring ring of crud around the tap fixtures in the sink. Hands trembling, she reached for the telephone and rang up Reverend Stottle, the Congregational minister, whose house was behind the church. Delirious with relief that she had caught him in, she immediately began telling him of her intense feelings of emptiness and panic. Her voice broke. His was unperturbed and assured. “There’s terror in all of us, May, and consciously and otherwise we spend our lives trying to keep it in check.”

  She reeled. “I see. Well, thank you, Reverend, for sharing that lovely piece of information.” She was ready to smash the receiver down, but his voice stayed in her ear.

  “We must face life, May. But first we must know what it is.”

  “I know what life is,” she came back at him, “I’ve always known. It’s a job you go to each day. Sometimes you call in sick and finally, Reverend, you call in dead.”

  “May, this doesn’t sound like you.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” she said and clicked off.

  Ten minutes later, with a cup of steaming coffee, her voice still unsteady, she was back on the phone. On the other end was Ethel Fossey, who was glad she had called. Ethel had something to tell her. “You won’t believe it, May. It’s bizarre.”

  Listening with a bruised ear, she sipped her coffee, burned her lip, and calmed herself. “No, I can’t believe that,” she interrupted. “A rumor like that shouldn’t be repeated. Where did you hear it?”

  “Fred told me. He heard it at town hall.”

  “Good God!”

  “You know what they say, May. It’s usually the husband, or in this case the boyfriend. They were breaking up, did you know that?”

  “Lydia wasn’t the one shot.”

  “Fred says it might not have been meant for her. At least that’s what he heard.”

  “Does he believe it?”


  “He doesn’t want to.” May shuddered. “This is nonsense.”

  “I told you it was bizarre.”

  A while later, with crosscurrents of feelings and an enervating nostalgia over her younger days, she sat at a drop-leaf desk and began a letter to her mother, who lived in a Florida retirement village. Her mother was in her eighties and in marvelous health. Dear Mom, she wrote and asked herself, “Do I want to live that long?” In a nice hand, copperplate, she gave an account of the funeral, the flag on Earl Lapham’s casket, the starkness of poor Lydia’s face. It’s good Earl went too, she wrote. He wouldn’t have lasted without Flo.

  When she finished the letter she realized with a bit of a shock that her handwriting had become almost childlike. She addressed the envelope with decided care and with a lick took the full taste of the stamp, which she pounded into place, her fist the hammer. Then, before tucking the letter inside, she added a postscript. Terrible rumor going around about the MacGregor boy — too vicious to repeat.

  It was after she had sealed the envelope and poured herself another cup of coffee that her thoughts turned to the whole MacGregor family: Arthur MacGregor walking out without so much as a good-bye, leaving poor Luella spinning like a toy, with her daughter, Diane, just entering her teens and Matt still a boy. Then poor Luella worked at some little job in Lawrence till her health went — her heart, she said, though it seemed more like her spirit. But by that time Diane had married well, someone outside the town, and Matt was nearly a man.

  Handsome boy, Matt, pug nose and all. He had mowed lawns and delivered papers. He had delivered hers. He had been good at high-school sports, she remembered, his picture in the paper more than once and then again when he became a policeman. Some people — although come to think of it, it may only have been Ethel Fossey — said he had sucked up to the chief to get the appointment. If so, so what? Sometimes it’s the only way you get things.

  What she did not understand, however, was what Lydia Lapham saw in him, for there had always seemed more to Lydia than to him. She, for one, had thought the girl would find herself some doctor, which would have pleased Flo. Unlike others in town, she was not surprised that Lydia and Matt had gone together for so long without marrying.