No Way Home

by Andrew Coburn

  “What? Don’t talk nonsense. Why would he do that?”

  “I know why.”

  • • •

  Matt MacGregor ate a meal and listened to his mother’s music. Peggy Lee sang “Say It Isn’t So” with a mellow seductiveness that affected his stomach. Perry Como’s “Prisoner of Love” churned it. The pain was bearable, in ways enjoyable. He could not imagine his father having shared with Mom what he had shared with Lydia, the kind of kisses that wallowed into the deeper ones and led to the antics of porno films. Hidden in his room was an old Polaroid of Lydia posing in a wet T-shirt. His mother never would have done that, nor would she have stood for his father whispering explicit things in her ear. That was a different generation.

  He cleared up, stacked the few things he had used into the dishwasher, and put away the milk. The house had one and a half bathrooms. The half bath had been his and his sister’s. Ducks, frogs, and sunfish still provided the motif. In the mirror he absorbed his own cankered smile in memory of a father whose face he scarcely remembered but from whom he had got his pug nose and nothing else.

  Stepping back, he shucked off his shirt to look manly. He looked more than manly. He was a cop. Flexing an arm, he made a muscle. He had more than muscles, he had firepower.

  Bare-chested, he phoned Lawrence General Hospital and, adding depth to his voice, asked for Lydia. He was transferred to a person who said she might be in the cafeteria. Would he like her to call him back? The impersonal tone of the voice, vaguely patronizing, kicked up a memory of Mrs. Lapham, whose dream was that Lydia would marry a doctor. He, Matthew MacGregor, was not up to her mark.

  “Sir.”

  An old anger moved a muscle. The old bitch never knew that Lydia had fucked around with a doctor already married and that he, Matthew MacGregor, had waited in the wings until she came back to him, damaged goods, which he received willingly, no complaints, no recriminations.

  “Do you want Nurse Lapham to call you back?”

  “Not necessary,” he said and banged the phone down. Even old man Lapham had considered him scrub, not varsity. It was not until the past year that the two of them had started worrying that Lydia would never marry and began favoring him.

  He turned up the radio. Sinatra was beating out “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” which stretched his anger. He climbed the stairs heavily, each thinly carpeted step sending up a discordant note of music, and entered the larger bathroom, where an old-fashioned tub clawed the floor and his mother’s best towels hung from a rack. The mirror flashed at him, and he menaced himself with a look. His eyes waxed. The lines around his mouth were ugly.

  He clumped into his boyhood bedroom in half mufti, and minutes later reappeared in full uniform, armed for bear. The handgun was unauthorized, a Magnum. He poised himself in the doorway of his mother’s bedroom, which was almost consumed by a four-poster for two people. His father had left so long ago he was no longer sure the man had ever existed. A framed photograph propped on the dresser was the only evidence. He aimed the Magnum. His hand jerked, the picture exploded.

  He descended the stairs with a lighter step and a vision. The entire length of Lydia’s body lay suddenly in his mind as if he were two persons and the other were with her now, having his way, taking his due. When she lay flat, her belly went in and her ribs came out. Then the vision darkened and altered. Not he but the chief was having his way. Whirling, knocking over a table lamp, he faced the old piano, tuneless now, that his sister had played dreadfully and he not at all. He fired two shots into it and struck chords drawn from the depths of the earth.

  His heart pounded, overdriven. His eyes were lightning bugs. In the heat of his head Lydia rose, turned her back on him, and mocked him with the bold slash of her rump. The chief crazed him with a fatherly smile. He fired again, shattering his mother’s only heirloom, a vase, and blowing a hole in the wall.

  His chest heaved. Through a roar he heard Peggy Lee crooning, “Where Can I Go Without You” and saw the singer’s gold-trimmed eyes and felt the breath of her red mouth. The words struck him. Lurching, Lydia in his head and the chief in his sights, he tripped over the lamp. His free hand leaped out to break the fall, but his gun hand, doubling in, detonated. In an instant, ugly and irrevocable, the shooter became the shot.

  12

  Meg O’Brien took a call from Mrs. Ingersoll, a neighbor of Mrs. MacGregor’s, anger in her voice. “He’s got his radio going full blast, and he’s shooting off firecrackers or something. Sounds to me like he’s wrecking the place.”

  “I’ll call him,” Meg said with hidden alarm.

  “You’d better do something! What’s his mother going to think, she comes home?”

  Before Meg could do anything, the other phone shrilled, and she grabbed it. It was another voice fraught with urgency. The night sergeant, who had been watching and listening, motioned to the chief, who was coming through the door. “Something’s up,” he said, and Morgan swept forward. Her face a bulge, Meg thrust the phone at him.

  “It’s Reverend Stottle calling about Matt. I’m not sure what he’s saying, but he’s scaring me.”

  Morgan took the phone and ordered the reverend to calm down. The night sergeant whispered to Meg, “What’s up?” She said, “Matt, God damn it. Matt.” Morgan barked into the phone, “What makes you say that?”

  Meg picked up a newspaper, furled it, and clutched it. Then she stood stone still until the chief put the receiver down. His face glittered from the heat. “I know Stottle’s batty,” he said, “but — ” Her teeth scraping her voice, Meg told him about the other call. He said, “I’m going over there.”

  “I’m going too.”

  “What’s going on?” the night sergeant asked.

  “Nothing,” Morgan said. “At least that’s what I hope.”

  The night sky was bright over the parking lot, with a great tide of stars speckling the unknown. Backing out, Morgan almost hit the sergeant’s car, but on the street he drove more reasonably. Shadows of teenagers wavered on the green. “He’s probably had too many beers,” Meg said in a small voice. “I bet that’s all it is.”

  The MacGregors’ house was lit. They could hear the music. Next door Mrs. Ingersoll appeared at one open window and her husband at another. Mrs. Ingersoll shouted, “He’s quieted down, but he’s still got that damn radio on.” Morgan ignored her. He told Meg to stay in the car, but she climbed out and dogged him to the front porch, where moths militarized against them. He rang the bell.

  “Jim, he probably can’t hear it.”

  He tried the door. It was unlocked. “Stay here,” he said and went in.

  The stench of cordite was strong, which for a moment stopped him in his tracks. Then his shoes crunched over broken bits of pottery. He saw the radio, an old Stromberg-Carlson, and killed the sound. His scalp prickled when he saw the fallen lamp, which was still burning, and glimpsed blood on the carpet, a smear here and an accumulation there. Meg was behind him, half a fist in her mouth.

  “Get out of here,” he said in a whisper. “Radio in for an ambulance.”

  “Where is he?”

  Breathing in the sickened air, he felt inner beads unravel. His head hummed as his eyes sought room for doubt. “Do as I say, Meg.”

  She obeyed, and he stood still with formal rigor, though he was not absolutely sure his feet were on the floor. From the shadows of an overstuffed chair came a voice he hardly recognized.

  “I’m here, Chief.”

  “I know you are.”

  MacGregor was sprawled deep in the chair. He was corpse-faced, like Andy Warhol. His uniform shirt was gore. His smile seemed someone else’s. “Not scared, are you, Chief?”

  What Morgan should have seen first he saw belatedly and feared for his life. But the bloodstained hand that held the Magnum, despite an agony of effort, lacked the strength to lift it. The voice was all ache and irony.

  “I can’t do nothing right, can I?”

  With caution, dreading enlightenment, Morgan cr
ept closer. “Reverend Stottle called. What was he trying to tell me, Matt?”

  “You don’t have the guts to hear.”

  “It’s time I did.”

  MacGregor coughed blood, producing a fine burst of sparks but leaving his smile intact. “I want to see her face when she finds out.”

  “Finds out what, Matt?”

  “I know her better than you. It’ll break her. It’ll crack her up.”

  Hearing footfalls, Morgan glanced over his shoulder at Meg, who kept her distance. Then the air altered, and he knew MacGregor was gone, though the face did not look truly dead. The eyes were half lidded in an intently thoughtful way as if the final details of death still needed ironing out.

  “Jim, is he?”

  Morgan, still staring down, said, “It would seem so.”

  • • •

  Nobody got sleep. At six in the morning Chief Morgan returned to the station. At quarter to seven Meg O’Brien went over to the Blue Bonnet and brought back coffee and doughnuts for everybody, using her own money, for none was in the kitty. All uniformed officers of the Bensington Police Department — once six, now five — were there. Sergeant Avery, whose eyes were red-rimmed, threw an arm around his cousin, who was nearer Matt MacGregor’s age. Despite her ankles, Bertha Skagg was in. Somehow she had heard.

  In his office, exhaustion written on his face, Morgan stood at the open window and drank in the morning air. Then he returned to his desk to consume the coffee but not the doughnut Meg had brought him. She sat nearby. The door was closed. “Someone will have to call his mother,” he said. “I can’t.”

  Meg said, “You have to.”

  Morgan tore a page from his calendar block and wiped up a coffee spill from his desk. “It had to have been an accident,” he said. “No man would have shot himself that way on purpose.”

  Meg said nothing. Cords stood out in her neck as if all her strength were situated there. Her eyes were simply spots in her face.

  “Most of the blood was near the knocked-over lamp, that’s where he must have done it.”

  “What difference does it make where he did it? He did it.”

  “I just want it clear in my mind.”

  Meg looked at him with much insight, all of it sympathetic, and said, “What you want made clear will take time.”

  “I don’t want the guilt, but I’ve got it.”

  “Then you’re choosing it.”

  Morgan’s eyes grew large. “Meg, I saw it in his face. He wanted to kill me.”

  “Most sons do.”

  “I wasn’t his father.”

  Meg picked at her blouse, which was sticking to her skin, to let in air. With some force she said, “What will you tell his mother?”

  “As little as possible.”

  “Then I’ll let you get to it,” she said and rose. At the door she looked back. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  • • •

  Except for the pervading heat, the day was uncertain. Clouds wrestled the sun. Distant thunder faintly rumbled, but no hint of rain followed, though a silvery bird squirted like water through the pines. Clement hopped the ruined step and entered his father’s house. “Where’s Junior?”

  Papa looked up from his cereal bowl. “You put Florida in his head, you shouldn’t of done that.”

  “He talked to you about it?”

  “I talked to him, told him what it’d be like. Told him he’d have to change the way he eats. Wouldn’t want him shamin’ you in front of your fancy friends. We figure you got plenty of them, livin’ like you do.” Papa scratched himself. “Also told him he’s got only one papa, and it ain’t you.”

  “You got your ways, don’t you?” Clement said. “So where is he?”

  Papa dug back into his cereal. “He got up early so I wouldn’t hear him. He took the truck.”

  Clement was concerned. “Can he drive it?”

  “He can drive good as anybody, but he ain’t got a license. I go to Lawrence I see people can’t speak English, but they got a license. You explain that.”

  “Aren’t you worried about him?”

  “He took twenty dollars from my pocket. That ain’t near enough.”

  “Near enough for what?”

  Papa smiled. “I know where he’s goin’.”

  • • •

  Chief Morgan made the call to the Cape. It was the daughter he talked to, Matt’s sister, thank God. The mother would have gone to pieces as soon as he said the words. The daughter, mother of three little ones, had more control, could hold in what would come later. “What kind of accident?” she asked, and he said, “With his gun.” Her voice went shrill. “Not that Magnum we begged him not to buy?” She could at least take temporary comfort in the fact that they had warned him. “Yes,” Morgan said.

  Afterward he faced the problem of telling Lydia Lapham and decided her aunt would be the best one to do it. After assigning Meg the task of phoning Miss Westerly, he left the station, tramped across the green, and headed for the house behind the Congregational church. Reverend Stottle, gaunt, something gone from his shoulders, was waiting. They sat on garden furniture under an intermittent sun.

  “I want to know exactly what he told you,” Morgan said.

  Reverend Stottle appeared muddled, stricken, fissured. “He said so much and yet so little, sometimes as if I weren’t there. As if I were already privy to the torture in his soul. The sense of it all didn’t strike me till after Mrs. Stottle and I had gone to sleep. I don’t know what woke me. Perhaps not a human hand. But it came too late, didn’t it, Chief?”

  Morgan spoke sharply, “From the beginning, tell me what he said.”

  “I’ve been going over it in my mind ever since. Matthew’s face, his alien voice, his cold, ironic words, they’re all in my hot head, Chief.”

  “Tell them to me!”

  Reverend Stottle cleared his throat, raised his face, and began reciting dialogue like a radio actor with two roles, two voices, one of them MacGregor’s, which he gave chilling and sardonic inflections. Morgan never interrupted and never took his eyes off him. His eyes blinked noticeably only when the name Rayball leaped from the reverend’s lips in MacGregor’s raw voice. When he finished the performance, for which applause would have been appropriate under different circumstances, Reverend Stottle wiped his embattled face and shuddered.

  “Is it as diabolical as I think it is, or am I reading too much into it? Tell me I am.”

  Morgan said, “Son of a bitch, Bakinowski was right.”

  “Is there blood on my hands, Chief?”

  “Maybe on a finger, but it’s all over me.”

  “I don’t think I missed anything.”

  “It was a confession, like you were a priest.”

  “If I were a priest, I could not have repeated a word of it. Praise my ancestors for being rabidly anti-papist.”

  • • •

  Junior Rayball sped south on Route 93 with his body thrown close to the wheel like Papa’s and hot winds blowing in from both open windows. Like Papa, he kept to one lane, no switching all around like those other drivers who swerved in front of him. Reaching Boston, he was not frightened by the soaring clamor of the Artery, for he had an animal’s sense of direction and knew just where to get off and then which turns to take. He did not fight the traffic like Papa often did, he went with it and smiled when others honked their horns. Sometimes he honked back and waved.

  He was put off now and then by the constant surges of traffic and almost sides wiped a taxi, but he kept his head and his smile and waved to a derelict who gave him the finger. The only thing that scared him was a motorcyclist varooming between lanes.

  He found the street, those dirty old buildings told him so. Church music springing out of a store confirmed it. He parked almost in the same spot Papa had and did not worry about the truck because Papa had said it was safe there. He took a few steps and then hurried back to retrieve the keys. Maybe it wasn’t that safe.

  He entered the little lobby o
f the hotel, every bit the same as he remembered, especially the smell of disinfectant that, like the other time, stirred a memory that did not quite emerge. Then he was smiling into the fat pink face of the man who had called Papa by a different name.

  The man remembered. “Richmond’s kid,” he said. “Where’s the old rooster?”

  “I left early,” Junior said.

  “That’s OK, we start early. Black or white? Your father alternates.”

  He looked confused. Then he said, “The one I had.”

  “I don’t remember the one you had, but I think your old man had Inez. She’s not one of the early birds. I got something precious you won’t have to make a choice, half this, half that, best of both. A real beauty is what I’m telling you.”

  The one he had had purple shades in her skin, a different purple down inside her place. He waited for the key, which he remembered hung off a hunk of clear plastic with a number on it.

  “Where’s your money?”

  He laid down two tens crinkly and worn from Papa’s pocket, all that had been in it, which did not please the man.

  “For that I can give you something looks like a woman, but he ain’t in yet. Besides, he might not be in at all. He twisted an ankle on those high heels.”

  As if it had all been a joke, the man gave him a wink, which might not have been one. The fat face made it hard to tell. He waited.

  “Thirty more you want the real thing.”

  Something was going wrong. “It’s all I got.”

  “Full fare, no kid prices.” A telephone was ringing. “Get out, boy, come back when you can do business.”

  He backed off, all the way to the door and stopped. He had got up too early and come too far not to get it. As the man talked, he edged toward the stairs. When the man half turned his back, he sneaked up them.

  The corridor was narrow and smelled of that stuff. He tried to be quiet. He tiptoed and heard nothing from the rooms. He jumped when a door opened and a white woman who looked as if she had just got up ballooned out in a pink robe. Her face had a roundness that made him remember a girl in third grade who had climbed the play slide with a hole in her underpants. He was behind her on the rungs. The woman, both breasts visible, scrutinized him, and now he knew something for sure, he didn’t like white. Black was better. The woman said, “You got money?”