No Way Home

by Andrew Coburn

  He had the two tens back, but he wasn’t going to spend them on her. Now she was looking at him in another way that reminded him of a teacher, first or second grade, he couldn’t remember.

  “I think you’d better go home,” she said.

  He crept on, turning a corner. He was looking for the rooms he and Papa had used, and he found them not by the numbers, just by where they were. It was Papa’s door he stopped at, as if now he were going to take Papa’s place. Quiet as he could, he twisted the knob and let the door swing open a little. A black woman was lying on the bed, and a white man was watching her touch the purple in her place. At first he thought she was only scratching herself. Then he caught the significance. The man’s face was explosive, pitted with shot holes.

  “Get out of here, kid.”

  “I ain’t no kid.”

  But he backed off, took a few steps away, and flattened himself against the corridor wall. He wondered if that was what Papa had done, only watched, but he remembered the sounds heard through the wall. Then the man came out the door and said, “Little bastard.”

  He took the blow on the head, but he didn’t fall, only staggered. The man had hit him with something metal, he didn’t know what. It might’ve been a lead pipe drinking water’s not supposed to run through anymore. Years ago a man from the town had told Papa to take theirs out, and Papa had told him to go to hell.

  He found the back stairs and sat on the top one. Blood dripped down his neck from the back of his head instead of the front, where it hurt the most. He thought he would sit there until he felt better, but the hurting got worse and went into his stomach. He made his way down the stairs and, with deliberate steps, ambulated through an alley to the street, where he locked himself in the pickup and scrunched down deep behind the wheel. His cap lay on the other seat, and he put it on.

  A questing homosexual man regarded him with curiosity and then with an urge to help, the kindness glimpsed and partly acknowledged, but the man moved on. Two prostitutes viewed him with amusement. One tapped on the window, but he ignored her. Later he lowered the window a crack. He needed the air.

  • • •

  When Chief Morgan returned to the station, Lieutenant Bakinowski was waiting for him in his office. Something was different about him, not only the new suit — a summer-weight French vanilla — but the eyes. They seemed too tightly set in their cages, as if something had driven them in for good. And he was not sitting presumptuously at Morgan’s desk as he tended to do, but squarely in a chair, like a visitor. He said, “We’ve got to figure out what it means.”

  Morgan dropped into the chair behind his desk. “You tell me what it means.”

  “I’m just trying to rule out the possibility he might have — ”

  “It was an accident. If you want to cut it fine, it might have been an accident meant to happen.” On his calendar block Morgan scribbled ”flowers — 2,” underscoring the word and circling the number. Then he said evenly, “But we can’t get into another man’s mind, isn’t that what you told me?”

  “I thought I was in his, I still think so, I’m just not so sure now. I drove him pretty hard, Chief, things you don’t know about.”

  “You don’t need to fill me in.”

  “If he had planned it, left a note, we’d have a confession. There’d be no doubts. Tell me something, Chief, do you still think I was wrong about him?”

  Morgan picked up the pencil again and toyed with it, breaking the point in the process. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “You’re not holding anything back on me, are you?”

  “What would be the purpose?”

  “I don’t know. It’s your god-damn little town.”

  The words had a constricting effect on Morgan. The pencil was fixed in his fingers. A chair scraped. Bakinowski rose, straightened his suit jacket, and narrowed the knot of his tie, which was tastefully lavender, with some yellow.

  “Too bad we didn’t work closer together, Chief. Maybe it wouldn’t have come to this.”

  “Who knows?”

  “Maybe neither of us knew what we were doing.”

  “I’ve had the same thought,” Morgan said tightly.

  “But we’re cops, for Christ’s sake. We had to follow our noses.”

  “You’re a cop,” Morgan said. “I don’t know what I am.”

  Rubbing his neck, Bakinowski stepped stiff-legged to the door. He was less himself without the swagger, or perhaps more himself. “I’ll admit this to you, Chief. I wouldn’t like to think I drove him to it.”

  Morgan waited until he opened the door. “He drove himself.”

  Junior Rayball came awake with a smile. He knew what that smell was now. It was Mama. Mama moving a mop and telling him not to step where it was wet. He heard the voice, he even saw the face, the same one he had seen so plain in the dream. A pretty face with strands of hair getting in the way. “Mama,” he said, but not loud because boys were about.

  He knew it was late because there was little light left in the sky and cars weren’t jumping by every second. Clinging to the wheel the way a squirrel grips a tree, he drew him up and told the hurt in his head to go away. He was all sweat, and his legs were sticky. Though he had tried not to, he had peed himself twice. He didn’t dare touch his head because it brought back the bleeding.

  The same boys kept walking by the truck, back and forth, the bigger ones without smiles. The smaller ones made faces and banged the door. One even crawled into the bed but didn’t stay. He closed his eyes and tried to bring Mama back, but she was gone, doing other chores, and he was sucking his thumb, which Papa hated but Mama didn’t mind. He was special, she said, needed protectin’.

  When he opened his eyes, two of the bigger boys were sitting on the hood and looking in at him, and one was scraping a knife across the windshield. He did what he knew Papa would’ve done. He turned the key on and roared the engine. Then, though it hurt him, he twisted the wheel as far as it would go and bounded onto the street. One of them stayed on longer than the other, and then that one fell, all his own fault.

  His brain crowded his skull, but he wasn’t scared. If he could get to I-93 he’d be all right.

  • • •

  Chief Morgan needed sleep, no doubt about it, but when he flopped onto the sofa, loafers kicked off, sleep would not come. His head stayed lit, and his thoughts came to sharp points over the Rayballs. Decisions had to be made, and he was making one on Papa, one that came much too easily. He lay with an arm over his eyes and then got up.

  Little in the refrigerator was edible. Leftover clam dip sported fuzz, a banana stank sweetly inside its blackened skin, and something indefinable crept from a dish that had been pushed to the rear. He threw everything out except three bottles of beer, a carton of milk that still smelled fresh, and a can of Hershey Syrup he had punched open two mornings ago. Mixing chocolate with milk, he downed a glass of it at the kitchen window. Lights from his neighbor’s house illuminated his backyard, where a raccoon, bold as brass, roamed at will.

  The heat of the day had come into the house for the night, and he stripped off his shirt, tossing it atop the one he had worn two days ago. He yearned for the fall, when he could watch the Celtics play, root for Bird in his final years. Best was when the Bulls came to Boston. Bird was wonderful, but Michael Jordan was awesome, his body a vital force apart from the man. Balling up a flyer from his unopened mail, he threw a three-pointer at the wastebasket and missed. He considered a shower and instead snatched the telephone from the wall.

  He called the Stottle residence and got Mrs. Stottle, who sounded shaken. “It’s Chief Morgan,” he said. “Am I disturbing you?”

  “No,” she said, “but the reverend’s not himself.”

  “Neither am I, Mrs. Stottle. May I speak with him?”

  Reverend Stottle came on the line with a voice that sounded in need of chicken soup. “Is there something more I can do for you, Chief?”

  “Yes, there is.”

 
“I can still hear Matthew’s voice in my head. It will be there forever.”

  “That’s what I’m calling about. I want you to pretend you were a priest. Your lips sealed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Chief, I’ve told Mrs. Stottle.”

  “Then ordain her. You owe me.”

  Scratching his chest through his T-shirt, he made his way back to the living room and dropped into the easy chair, whose arms were frayed. It had belonged to his wife’s mother and was among the many donations she had made to her daughter’s venture in a marriage meant to last a lifetime. His eyes were closed. Sleep came. In a dream he and Elizabeth were feeling their way toward each other in the dark of an unfamiliar room. He could hear her steps, then her breathing, but the woman who slid into his arms was Lydia Lapham.

  • • •

  Lydia Lapham stepped out of her car in the white of her uniform. The moon, the sun’s negative, hung ghostly, much of it missing. Her shadow, a scarecrow, followed her to the front door. She rapped lightly, stepped in, and called his name. She knew he was home because his car was in the drive. Her steps were tentative because she had not been in his house before. A light beckoned from the kitchen. He was not in it. He was in the living room.

  “James,” she said.

  He was sprawled in an easy chair, his legs tossed out, his arms lying lean out of a T-shirt. He was unshaved and unshod. His sleep was sound. She prodded his stockinged foot with the scuffed white toe of her shoe.

  “James,” she said, and he came awake slowly and then all at once. He took a deep breath as if for a whiff of her. “Why didn’t you tell me yourself?” she said.

  “I didn’t know how.”

  “So you left it to my aunt.”

  “It was the easiest way.”

  “You look like hell,” she said.

  “So do you,” he said.

  She batted back her hair. “I worked through my shift. It was a way to stay sane. Why did he do it, James?”

  Morgan drew in his legs and sat erect. His brow was scribbled. He was pondering something, words that would not come out, though they might have had she waited for them.

  “If you don’t know, I do,” she said. “I did it to him.”

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “All the same, that’s what it was,” he said calmly.

  “You’re lying.”

  He lifted himself from the chair, his legs shaky, and went into the kitchen. She followed him. His back to her, he made himself another chocolate drink, using the last of the milk, and raised the glass. “Shall we share it?”

  “God, no.”

  “Want a beer?”

  “Yes.”

  She drank from the bottle. She stayed standing while he sat at the table. With a start, she said, “Did you hear that?”

  “Thunder. It’s done that all day.”

  “God in heaven meeting Matt. He loved me, you know, very much.”

  “I know.”

  “And I did love him once, high school, puppy love in the backseat. And then, after Frank, he was still around, waiting, wanting. It was easy to fall back into something that was over. He was solid, dependable, not a bad lover, but he became an assault on my time, my attention, my moods. If I had not let it drag on and on, this might not have happened.”

  “That’s not something to dwell on,” Morgan said.

  “Was it really an accident?”

  “I’m not the only one who says it. The state police say it too, Bakinowski himself. That’s what his report will read.”

  She scraped an unpainted nail down the bottle’s label, and both she and Morgan remembered that that was what MacGregor used to do, invariably. She said, “I was sure it was suicide. Do you know what my first reaction was? Outrage. Pure anger and outrage for heaping guilt on me atop everything else.”

  “Don’t feel guilt about anything, Lydia. You have no reason.”

  She belched softly. “Excuse me.” Her eyes traveled. “Crummy house you have, don’t you ever pick up?”

  “I do it in spurts.”

  “Is this where we’d live if we got married?”

  “Here or your place. Either would do.”

  “Neither would suit me.” She put the bottle down. “Don’t put stock in anything I say. I’m thinking out loud.”

  “I realize that.”

  “Summers usually fly by, but this one’s pasted in place. I want it to end.”

  “I do too.”

  “James, who killed my mother and father?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow I think I can give you an answer.”

  • • •

  During the night the sky convulsed, and the rains came, waking Papa Rayball, who had fallen asleep in a chair with the old black-and-white television blaring. “Little shit’s not home,” he said aloud, springing up and turning off the TV. “He’s wrecked my truck is what he’s done.” He double-checked Junior’s bedroom, but the cot was empty, which set him cursing and then worrying. He went into the kitchen and banged around and then carried a mug of apple juice to the screen door. Through the rain he saw the pickup.

  He was going to throw on a jacket, but he was too angry to take the time. Water slobbered off the roof, which lacked a gutter, and splashed his neck and soaked the back of his shirt, which angered him more. The rain battered the pickup. Through a web of it he saw Junior behind the wheel. “ ‘Fraid to come in?” he shouted. “You got reason!” He yanked open the door, and Junior fell out.

  Hunkering down to grab him up, Papa knew in the instant that what was in his arms was dying, and he wailed like a woman. Then he pleaded, “Don’t, Junior. You’re all I got. You’re my boy!”

  “No, Papa. I ain’t never been your boy.”

  His eyes were open, and Papa squeezed him. He shouldn’t have. It hurt him. The rain washed blood from his head and showed the split. Papa said, “Clement’s not mine. It’s you that’s mine.”

  Junior’s eyes rolled.

  13

  It was early morning. Trees were awake, birds gossiped. Chief Morgan, staring out his kitchen window, finished up his coffee, black because the milk was gone. The nearly empty beer bottle stood where Lydia Lapham had left it. He had kissed her cheek, her ear, the dent in her temple, and she had stayed longer but not the night. He placed his cup in the sink and left the bottle where it was. When he stepped out the front door he heard the tinkling collar of the neighbor woman’s dog, which had just deposited droppings on his lawn. From her porch the woman called out, “Come here, Buster.”

  Morgan called back, “There’s a leash law, Mrs. Winkler.”

  She placed a hand on her hip. “Instead of worrying about a little shit on your grass, better you bring in a murderer.”

  “I intend to,” he said, heading toward his car. “Maybe with my bare hands.”

  She stepped back, as if somehow she knew he was not joking.

  He went to the Blue Bonnet for breakfast, he needed a big one, but ordered only juice, coffee, and one English muffin. The place was crowded, but the talk, focused on Matt MacGregor, was subdued. Morgan’s statement, over his coffee, that it was an accident, no question about it, was neither disputed nor believed. Faces were friendly only to the point of politeness. On his way out, Orville Farnham, a selectman besides an insurance man, motioned him to his table and said, “Maybe now we can clear up that other thing.”

  Morgan said, “That’s what I intend to do.”

  Farnham said, “You’re a good man, Chief. Maybe too good for this job.”

  In his office, Morgan examined his revolver. The bore, he suspected, was pitted. He pictured the whole business exploding in his hand. Swiveling in his chair, his back to the door, he tried firing it empty. It jammed. He called in Meg O’Brien.

  “You still carry that little gun of yours in your bag?” he asked.

  She cocked her head. “What do you wa
nt to know for?”

  “I need to borrow it.”

  “What for?”

  “Just in case.”

  “What’s the matter with yours?”

  He pushed his across the desk. “Take a look at it,” he said, and she picked it up and examined it.

  “Jesus jumping Christ, I see what you mean.” She went out and returned with her bag and took out her little gun, toy-sized and snub-nosed. “Before I give it to you, I want to know what you want it for.”

  “I plan a serious talk with Papa Rayball, just him and me, but he may have guns in his house. I don’t want to stand there barefaced if he goes running for one.”

  Hesitantly Meg relinquished her little weapon, well oiled and regularly cleaned, shiny as a new nickel. “You haven’t got much firepower there,” she said, “and it’s not too accurate, so aim at the body, not the head.”

  “Meg, I was in Nam.”

  “That was years ago, and this isn’t Nam. Don’t shoot yourself,” she said. Her voice was nervous. “He’s little, you could miss. Take Eugene with you. He’s feeling better. He hasn’t got his problem anymore.”

  “That’s good, I didn’t like his color,” Morgan said. “But I don’t need him.” His eye went to the calendar block. “Could you do flowers for me? On one I’m a little late. You could have them sent to the house. Mrs. Poole.”

  “I was wondering if you were going to do that. First name’s Christine, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He was embarrassed. “It’s proper, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know if it’s proper, but I’ll do it.” She reached over and ripped the page off. “Before you go, Chief, could we sit here and talk awhile? About Matt?”

  “Sure,” he said, “I’m in no real rush. Funny thing, but I feel I’ve got all the time in the world now. How about some coffee?”

  • • •

  At the crack of dawn Papa Rayball drove to the motor inn in Andover and knocked on Clement’s door. He did not tell Clement what was wrong, he merely said, “It’s Junior. You gotta come.” He drove back to Bensington in the pickup, a blood-soaked cap on the floor near his clutch foot. He was going to throw it out the window but decided it would be better burned. Clement followed several minutes later in the rental.