No Way Home

by Andrew Coburn

  “What are you sorry about?”

  “Everything. Me especially.” He finished off her root beer. “What do you think about when you wake up at three in the morning?”

  “My ulcer. That’s what wakes me.”

  “I didn’t know you had one.”

  “A lot of things you don’t know, but that’s all right. You’re not supposed to. Watch the phone, will you?”

  She gathered up containers and cutlery from her desk and went into the lavatory to wash them out. He stayed seated and gave way to a mood. What if they don’t find the rifle? What if they do? Can I connect it to Papa?

  Meg returned and said, “You didn’t ask me what I dream about.”

  “OK, what do you dream about?”

  “A lover dying in my arms and leaving me an annuity.” She sat down at her desk, poised unevenly as if her buttocks were of unequal balance. “You’re right, water’s the best place to throw something, but I wouldn’t pick Paget’s. It was me, I’d toss it in the river from the bridge at the West Newbury line.”

  Morgan studied her face. “Yes, so would I.”

  • • •

  Clement Rayball drove to Lawrence. The place he was looking for, Sherman’s Rod & Gun, was situated between a pet store with a sick parrot in the window and a woman’s shop where the mannequins were gussied up to suggest accomplished whores. A bell rang when he entered the gun shop and did not stop until he stepped back and closed the door securely. Sherman was a gaunt fellow with pouched eyes and an embroidery of neck skin. Clement explained what he wanted, and Sherman, whose eyes stayed hooded, wheezed down, opened a low drawer under the counter, and came up with two heavy-duty handguns of the sort that cost serious money.

  “Take your pick.”

  Clement said, “I don’t want one to keep under my pillow forever. I just want one that works.”

  “You want a cheap-o.”

  “I don’t want one that’s going to break up in my hand.”

  Sherman returned the big handguns to their privileged place and produced a Saturday night special. Clement inspected it carefully, and Sherman said, “It works, don’t worry.”

  Clement balanced it in his hand, opened and closed the chamber case, tried the trigger, and said, “How much?”

  “Two hundred.”

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “One hundred. That’s as low as I go. You want ammo?”

  “I don’t need much.”

  “I got a few loose slugs. I’ll throw ‘em in the bag. Got your permit?”

  “Do I need one?”

  “You sure do,” Sherman said, and Clement peeled off a hundred-dollar note and laid it on the counter. Then he added two more.

  “Do I need one?”

  “You sure don’t.”

  • • •

  Reverend Stottle was in bed, suffering. Mrs. Stottle brought him broth, and he sat up so she could arrange a tray over his lap. The napkin was one of their linen ones. When everything was settled for him, he reached for her hand, which was always there to accompany him through strife. He could always count on her. “My Sarah,” he said.

  She felt his brow. “I’d say it’s nothing more than a little touch of something.” Her eyes went wise. “You haven’t been up to anything, have you?”

  He tasted the broth, letting the grease linger on his lips before licking it off. “God,” he said, “gave all of us hindsight, but few of us foresight.”

  “That means you have,” she said and went to the window to raise the shade. A ceiling fan, whirring quietly, rearranged the heat in the room. “Who have you antagonized now?” When he did not answer, she said, “You’d better cool it if you want to keep your job.”

  “I had a dream last night.”

  “I thought so. You were tossing.”

  “I dreamed I answered a knock on our door and found Jesus lying on the step, dead of his wounds. Why would I have such a dream? What does it mean?”

  “It means you shouldn’t have eaten all those Oreo cookies before you went to bed.”

  He stared at her. She was a down-to-earth woman, someone to whom he could always return after his flights of fancy. He soaked a Saltine in his broth and ate it when it turned to mush. “All of us,” he said, “are born in blood and usually die in a bigger mess. That’s our beginning, Sarah, that’s our end.”

  Her back to him, she was busy poking in the dresser, where he could see her face in the glass. She was no beauty, granted, but she had provocative features and had never lost her shape. When they were young she had dished herself up to another man before settling on him. A man unworthy of her. But that was years ago and ninety percent gone from his mind.

  “Only Adam,” he said, “came into this world pure. He had no belly button. He was God-made.”

  She shut the dresser. “And you have lint in yours, and a wonderful lady made you.”

  That was true, and it brought tears to his eyes. His mother, God rest her soul, had died last winter, a year younger than Mrs. Dugdale. He wished he had been there to do for her what he had done for Mrs. Dugdale in those short hours before death.

  The telephone by the bed detonated.

  It split his head and spilled his broth. His wife rushed forth and snatched it up before it could explode again. Her voice was clear and gracious, that of a reverend’s helpmate. She placed her hand over the mouthpiece.

  “Matthew MacGregor wants to talk to you.”

  He paled and gestured hard and fast. “Tell him I can’t talk to him right now. Tell him I’m indisposed.”

  “He can’t talk to anyone right now, Matthew. He’s under the weather.”

  “Way under,” Reverend Stottle whispered.

  Her hand was back on the mouthpiece. “He says he’s coming over.”

  • • •

  Chief Morgan glimpsed Randolph Jackson leaving the Blue Bonnet and caught up to him on the green when Jackson paused to breathe in the scent of the grass and other growing things. His eyes were small, as if he had not had his required sleep. The chief said, “I’m expecting a break in the Lapham case.”

  Jackson looked at once expectant and dubious. He patted down his hair and waited.

  “Two scuba divers from Lawrence are searching Paget’s Pond for the weapon,” Morgan said.

  “That’s where you think it is?”

  “That’s where I thought it was, and it might be, but since then I got a tip it’s in the river, at the West Newbury bridge.”

  “So they’re probably wasting their time in the pond. Where’d you get the tip?”

  “From a wonderful woman,” Morgan said.

  “I hope she’s not from the Heights,” Jackson said with his eyes in the air and started to move on. Morgan stopped him.

  “There’s a problem, Randolph.”

  “A problem, Jim. Don’t we have enough of those?”

  “The divers are working the pond gratis, a personal favor from the fire chief in Lawrence, but if they come back tomorrow to do the river I might have to think about paying them.”

  “Well, you have a budget, Jim. Unless you’re already in the red, which is usually the case.” There was an edge to Jackson’s voice. He was generous in many ways but never with money, his own or the town’s, which he considered his own. “And you’ve always been a sloppy bookkeeper.”

  “I was wondering if we could come up with some creative accounting,” Morgan said blithely, and Jackson gave out a wild smile.

  “Do you know what my wife says, Jim? Do you know what Suzy says about us? She says you intimidate me. She says you do it by just being your damn self, like the whole town revolves around you.”

  “I didn’t realize she felt that way.”

  “Well, this time I won’t be intimidated. If you want to search that river, you jump into the water yourself. So there you have it!”

  Jackson swaggered away in triumph, whacking down his sandy hair, though none of it was up. Morgan watched him for a while and then turned and left the gr
een. Malcolm Crandall and Fred Fossey were standing on the town hall steps, and he quickened his pace to avoid conversation. In the station, Meg O’Brien gave him a grave look. Sergeant Avery was still not back from the Blue Bonnet and the station was quiet, but she said, “Can we go into your office?”

  He went in first and plunked himself down at his desk, tearing off two bygone pages from his calendar block, which he seldom used. He preferred keeping things in his head. “So what’s up?” he said.

  “Christine Poole from the Heights, she’s a friend of yours, isn’t she?”

  “I know her.”

  “Her husband was killed last night on Ninety-three. His car hit an abutment.”

  For a number of seconds Morgan did not react. Then he ripped another page from the block. “How do you know?”

  “Ethel Fossey’s been phoning people. I must’ve been last on the list.”

  He ran a hand across his chin. “Thank you, Meg. On your way out, close the door please.”

  Alone, he looked at his watch. The seconds ticked in his head. When they made a minute, he lifted the phone and tapped out a number, which rang and rang and, like many things in his life, went unanswered. He imagined her sitting alone, stone still, as if under an infernal spell; then he wiped the image from his mind and rang up Drinkwater’s Funeral Home.

  “Everett, this is Jim Morgan. Do you have Calvin Poole there?”

  “Yes, we do. We got him in this morning. He’s not too bad, considering.”

  “Is Mrs. Poole there?”

  “Yes, she is. My oldest boy is helping her with arrangements.”

  “How is she doing, Everett?”

  “Holding it all in. A lot of people do that.”

  “Yes, she would,” Morgan said without meaning to, and the image of her alone returned, this time with her face stark and frozen. “Everett, she didn’t come by herself, did she?”

  “No, Chief, one of her sons is here. The boy flew up from New York. Also she has a friend with her. A Mrs. Bowman, I believe.”

  The image fled. “Thank you,” he said and started to hang up. “Everett, don’t tell her I called.”

  Too late. The line was dead.

  • • •

  Clement Rayball pushed himself out of his car and trod over grassless ground to where Papa was tinkering with a bicycle. He said, “You make much money doing this?”

  “It adds to Social Security and what you give me. ‘Sides, I do it only when I feel like it, keeps me busy.” Papa spun a wheel. “I pick the bikes up and I bring ‘em back. I give people service.”

  Clement glanced around. “Where’s Junior?”

  “He’s off again. Yesterday he didn’t do the weekly wash, and he still ain’t done it.” Papa wiped his hands in a rag and shook sweat from the tip of his nose. The heat was abrasive. “You messin’ up his mind, Clement? I didn’t ask you to come all the way back to do that.”

  “Why did I come back, Papa?”

  “ ‘Cause this is family. You like it or not, you ain’t got no other.” Papa tossed the rag aside. “You wanna get out of the heat, we can go in the house. No, it’s hotter inside. We can go over there.”

  They ambled to the taller pines, where the wet was sultry and bright greenery had been spored into existence overnight. The claw marks of some wild animal gave drama to the soft ground. Missing heads of wildflowers suggested a groundhog.

  “You know, Papa, you always made me think Ma was no good. I grew up thinking that, even when she was alive. But in my heart I know the kind of woman she was, she was a good woman.”

  “A husband knows, a son don’t.”

  Clement wore an expression of purpose, necessity, but it began to crumble of its own weight. He broke off a fern frond and ran his thumb and index finger down the length of it, against the grain, stripping it of its growth. “Junior never shot that woman, Papa. You did.”

  Papa was cool. “You been listenin’ to lies.”

  “No, I’ve been listening to myself. Junior doesn’t have it in him to shoot anybody. But you do.”

  Papa’s cool was intact, with something like pride added to it. “You was always smart.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “For Junior. Someone treats him like shit, it’s the same as treatin’ me that way. It tells you what they think of all of us.”

  “So you tried to take MacGregor’s girl out and hit the mother instead.”

  “She got in the way.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “Then I ain’t gonna argue it.”

  “For whatever god-damn reason you did it, why did you involve Junior? Why the hell did you bring him along?”

  “Guess you ain’t so smart.” Papa’s color rose high, only partly from the heat. “ ‘Case something went wrong afterward. Me, they’d fry. Junior they’d only put in a home or someplace. He might even be better off there. I ain’t gonna live forever, and you ain’t gonna want him in your fancy life.”

  “Junior was the hedge to save your own ass.”

  “Look at it how you want.”

  “When I go back to Florida,” Clement said evenly, “I’m taking him with me. I’ll let you and the chief fight it out. That is, if he’s still chief. He might not be.”

  A muscle jerked in Papa’s face. “You want Junior, take him, but he ain’t likely to go. He don’t know how to spit without me.

  Clement said, “I’ll teach him.”

  • • •

  Chief Morgan, anxious to return to Paget’s Pond to negotiate the following day with the divers, slipped out of the station and hustled into the parking lot as a Rolls Royce crashed through a haze of heat and ground to a stop. Morgan recognized the car and the driver and said, “Not now. Sweet Jesus, not now.” A door flew open, and Crack Alexander, quite tall, came out of the Rolls in a crouch. Morgan was six feet; Crack, erect, was five inches taller. His voice was bigger.

  “Where do you wanna talk, Chief? You wanna talk here, or someplace else?”

  Morgan gave a quick scan of the back of the town hall. No faces were in any of the windows, which dismayed him. He wanted the protection of witnesses. “Here’s all right,” he said.

  “You’re a cop, how come you don’t wear a gun? First time you came to the house, you didn’t have one then either. I was cuffing the wife around, remember?”

  “I remember,” Morgan said.

  “That’s when you first met me. And Sissy. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s when it began, you and her. Right?”

  Morgan said nothing. The space between him and Crack was negligible. He could see the fillings in the big fellow’s teeth and the hair in his nose.

  “Don’t deny it, she’s told me everything.”

  Told him everything? Did that include the hours he never laid a hand on her but simply sat close while she related her life in a girl’s voice? Did it include the few times he did make love to her and she invariably called him Crack? The time she said, Crack likes to do it this way? He murmured, “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to look at me.”

  He was looking at him, but they were within a circle too tightly closed. He was seeing large pores, an old scar over one eye and crow’s feet beneath it.

  “What do you see?”

  The longer he looked the less intimidating he found him. Gone was the muscularity that had suggested barbells and metal stretching devices. In its place was a vague bigness.

  “What you see is a has-been. It took you and Sissy to tell me something I wouldn’t admit to myself. How old are you, Chief?”

  “Forty-five,” Morgan said, knocking off a year.

  “I’m thirty-seven. In baseball that’s two years past retirement.”

  “Don’t tell Nolan Ryan that,” the chief ventured.

  “Nolan Ryan’s a pitcher playing with an artificial arm, like Tommy John did. I’m a hitter. They don’t give hitters artificial eyes. Wade Boggs, he’
s got the eyes I had. ‘Course, he’s a lousy singles hitter. I always stroked the big ones. Shit, I was young, they compared me to Williams.”

  Morgan sensed the circle widening. Air blew in. The Rolls had been left running. The throb of the fine-tuned motor could have been the hum of a human heart.

  “Fact is, I can afford to retire. Kind of money I made, I got nothing to worry about.”

  Morgan said, “I’m sure you don’t.”

  Crack’s squared shoulders gave in a little. The aggressive stance sank into a lesser attitude. “When I found out about you and Sissy, I was gonna beat her to a pulp, but the strength went out of me. It was like she wasn’t really there but gone from me. I didn’t want to lose her.”

  “I can understand that.”

  Crack gave him a knowing look. “Forget what you two did together, I don’t care. All the gals I had, they didn’t mean anything to me, and you didn’t mean anything to her. I got her word for that.”

  “She’s all gold,” Morgan said, which Crack took the wrong way, with pride.

  “She’s a real blonde, not one of those others. But I’ll tell you something more important you didn’t know. I might be going out of the bigs, but I’ll always be her hero.”

  Morgan wanted to say something, but his brain stuck. Then it unstuck, and he said, “Any chance of getting one of those autographed balls like you gave my sergeant?”

  Crack grinned wide and, stepping back, reached into the Rolls. “Here, have two.” Then he gave a sweeping wave to the town hall. In each window was a face.

  • • •

  Tish Hopkins’s square-cut gray hair bobbed in the sun. The heat did not bother her. She was a tough old bird, perhaps a little younger than she looked, and still lean as cable wire. With the death of her husband, too many years ago for her to think about, she had lost one of the deeper meanings of her life, but her essential self prevailed. The farm was not all that it once was, but she had steadfastly refused to sell so much as an acre, which put her on the wrong side of Randolph Jackson when he was selling his woodland to a developer and wanted to work her acreage into the deal. All the cows were gone except an old thing not worth the bother, but she kept it for sentimental reasons and for the manure, which she could still shovel with strength and enjoyment. With the same enjoyment she fed her hens, prime layers, and gathered their eggs, frequently placing one against her cheek as if it were precious. That was what she intended to do now, gather eggs from one of the coops, but a shadow near the woodshed snared her eye and proved to be alive.