“You all right, Professor?”
“Rosalie. I thought you were escorting me home, Jack. It was very reassuring and then, when you stayed back there, not so reassuring.” Her car was a litter of books and papers and fast-food sacks. Her defroster made a very loud roar. Looking down from the Jeep into the squat car, I saw that her coat and skirt were pulled back for easier driving. I looked at her legs, then back to her face.
I said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to press you. I was worried about those tires. You really need to replace them.”
“And I am going to. I was going to ask with what?”
“With what?”
“Replace the tires with what?” She grinned widely, enjoying her joke.
“Other tires, I think. Newer ones.”
“Ah,” she said seriously, “other tires. Well, then, I will. Thank you, Jack.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her face was solemn, and then the grin came back. “ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ” she said. “Thank you for guarding me. Good night.”
She drove on slowly and unsteadily. I turned myself around and drove out of town toward the long, greasy hill that would end in Masonville. I didn’t know what I would look for and, a half an hour later, as I came in slowly, in four-wheel drive, down the long approach to the small business district a few streets beyond the squat cement buildings of the campus, I found myself turning my head a little quickly, looking for strange behavior, like someone on patrol. They had their own security force, of course, a lot larger than ours, and I ought to report to them. But this wasn’t college business. This was, as Randy Strodemaster would say, community business. There was gown and there was town, and this was town, he would say. I thought of his handsome face and his filthy bathrobe. I looked for anything and I found nothing. Snow blew across the streetlamps, and sparse traffic lit the dirty slush in the road. The windows of bars and a diner were fogged. People were in there, generating heat, and, according to Elmo St. John, Janice Tanner was under the ice of a lake somewhere, or stuffed in a barrel, wrapped in a sack.
He was right, I thought. He was probably right. I saw the oversized air scoop that ruined the profile of the Trans Am, and I pulled into the curb and parked and shut my lights off. I left the engine on to run the heater. He was probably right, but maybe she lived in spite of the FBI profile and the experience we all shared, which insisted that what these men are in love with is death. The suffering is incidental, much as they enjoy provoking it. The fear, much as they might relish it, was also incidental—no, it was secondary. What they loved was death, because what they feared was their deadness. And if you can give death, you’re alive, you’re in power over who you’ve fastened to the tabletop or floor, you’re a little bit of a god.
I thought of Mrs. Tanner. Whoever took Janice had a different notion of gods.
Power, I thought. I had to remember that and ask Elmo and maybe Fanny, though I didn’t think she could talk about this a lot. It was power, and then the child was dead and the power was gone and you had, after some time, to start again. That was for the cops, I thought. All I wanted was Janice Tanner back, I told myself, and I knew it wasn’t true.
William Franklin’s car, parked around the corner of a long clapboard bar, wasn’t empty like I’d thought. A head moved up in the front seat, on the passenger’s side, and then what I’d thought was a headrest began to move on the driver’s side. They had been engaging in recreation, and their posture suggested what it was. I felt a little jump in my own body. The doors opened and a short girl walked around the car to the driver’s side. Franklin got out and they embraced, leaning against the door he’d closed.
I had no authority to follow him or roust him, and I thought he’d come after me if I beat on him in front of his girlfriend. Then the local cops would come, and the state police, and I’d be in the shit, with nothing learned. I’d known this in advance, hadn’t I? So why, on a night so terrible for driving, had I driven here?
“You don’t know that,” I said, “you’re stupider than I thought.”
And because of the eyes in the wallpaper, Jack. I leaned forward to turn on my lights and shift into first, and my body ached like I’d been beaten by the kid I was about to start roughing up. Go home, I told myself, thinking about the wallpaper. You go home and go upstairs and you look back at them.
The dog and I were outside next morning, and as I watched him roll on his back, grinding at a piece of rabbit several decades old that he’d brought back as a trophy, Fanny wobbled over the crisp ice to park her car. He was up and waiting, paws on the door, his big brush of a tail wagging. I thought of the Labrador sniffing for the bomb they hadn’t found. There was this optimism in dogs. They got up and charged into the day with a confidence I wanted to have. Looking at the rabbit haunch, I was grateful my nostrils were sealed by the cold.
Fanny’s, apparently, weren’t. She held her nose.
“I think it goes back to Lyndon Johnson’s administration.”
With her hand away from her face, she said, “All those presidents smell the same to me.”
We stood in the deep cold and nodded in agreement.
“I have to go soon,” I said. “I’ve been getting in later and later, and I believe I’m going to be reprimanded. I needed to talk to you. Have you got a minute?”
“Have I got a minute,” she said. “You and I spend a dozen hours a day chasing after strangers to mop their blood up and rescue their vehicles and generally smooth the way—”
“Smoothing the way. That’s good.”
“That’s what we do. We’re utilities. Like electricity.”
“Smoothing the way. I can’t think of anything rough I’ve turned smooth.”
“Like goddamned sandpaper,” she said.
“The tears will freeze on your eyes,” I said.
“Except I’m not crying,” she said. “Come inside. Have I got a minute. God, Jack.” She was inside the door, reaching back to hold it open for me. The dog went in, and I followed. She stood in the mudroom with her coat halfway off her shoulders. “Have I got a minute. And we’re passing each other, going back and forth like little ferries. Where was it, before you reported to Fort Leonard Wood, and we got a week—where did we go, where the ferries kept going there and back, there and back?”
“Seattle.”
“Vashon-Seattle, Seattle-Vashon. They were going to Canada, right?”
“We stayed in a hotel you said didn’t have mice or rats because the boa constrictors ate them.”
She let her coat slide down her arms and back. It pooled on the floor around her feet. I picked it up.
“Jack. Yes. I’ve got a minute.” She stood in front of me with her arms hanging, her shoulders sloped. It was a perfect picture of exhaustion. I think she could have slept standing before me. I knew it wasn’t only fatigue from work. We were grinding each other away with a kind of friction that didn’t involve our touching each other.
I said, “You know the little kid who disappeared? The one they’re offering a reward on?”
“I see her face all day. Everyplace. It’s a terrible little face. It’s so open.”
“One of the professors hooked her parents up with me. He was talking to Archie Halpern and I guess Archie said something about me and the MPs and some of the work I did, so this professor decided he needed my help. The Tanners asked me to do something. I don’t know what to do.”
“Just talking to them is something. You’re doing it, I assume.”
“I don’t know. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“You know how they feel.”
“No, it isn’t the same.”
“It isn’t the same. But you know how they feel.”
I nodded, and I could swear she knew I was going to drop on her, because I heard her feet move, as if she had set them. I leaned over onto her. I let my head fall onto her shoulder where it runs up into the neck. It must have hurt. She winced. But I felt, all of a sudden, the way she had looked a moment be
fore. I thought my bones couldn’t hold me anymore. We got locked up like that, my empty left hand and my right still holding her coat in a fist, both of them behind her now, one of her arms around the small of my back, the other on my arm, and each of us at the same time trying to let our weight go and hold each other up.
The dog heard her sniff, and he thumped his tail. It hit the washing machine behind her and made a resonating noise. He did it again.
I said, “Oh boy.”
He probably thought I said, “Good boy,” because he slammed his tail against the washer.
Fanny said, “Poor, poor people.”
“Poor people,” I said.
Fanny said, “I was referring to us.”
She stepped out from under me, and I moved away. We avoided each other’s eyes.
“Listen,” I said. “A thing happened yesterday. Did you hear about the runaway girl?”
“They brought her over for a physical. They were sending her home. Yonkers, New York. She’d been gone for months, and then she lost some diddly job she shouldn’t have been given in the first place and she ended up here.”
“Sleeping at school.”
“You found her?”
“Yeah. She didn’t think I was doing her a service.”
“How’d you know about her?”
“I saw her on one of those supermarket milk cartons.”
“We don’t drink milk,” Fanny said. She went to the refrigerator and she opened the door. “See?” she said. “No milk. You never go into the supermarket. So why would you notice a milk container in the market, Jack?”
“I went in there one time, I guess. I guess I noticed them. How can I go in there and not notice them?”
“This does not help, Jack.”
“It helped her parents. But listen—there was something she said I wanted to ask you about.”
“They did a physical on her. Whatever he did had healed. She’d been gone awhile.”
“You think he did it? Her father?”
“You are not a guard at a nursery school, Jack. You know about these things.”
“But I had to send her back, right?”
Fanny sat at the kitchen table. Her chin was in her palm, her elbow was on the table, and she looked more tired than anyone I’d seen since the war.
I said, “Right?”
She might have moved her head. I couldn’t tell.
“Am I nuts, Fanny?”
“Sometimes—I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe we’re both crazy and our marriage went crazy and the only sane thing in our lives is a dog. That’s what I sometimes think.”
I remembered, once, telling her how fortunate we were not to keep a gun in the house, because one of us would use it for sure on the other someday. She’d reminded me we did have a gun in the house and I had to admit I thought I’d kept it hidden from her.
I wondered why I was thinking of the gun. I moved myself back to her and drew her by the waist. She lifted her arms to my shoulders, and I thought of how old couples, when the right music comes on the kitchen radio, can fit together so easily and start to dance. I kept my eyes closed and I matched us, chest and belly and groin and thigh. I pulled her to me the strongest I could.
“Fanny,” I said “Tell me what to do. Tell me what to know.”
We rocked at one another, and it was like getting a memory back, except in the flesh.
She pulled me. I thought we were going to fall onto the floor. I felt the heat of her mouth when she whispered, “Tell me why our baby died.”
I tried to answer. I don’t remember the words I wanted. The dog began to bang his tail along the floor because I was doing Fanny’s trick. I couldn’t hear if she had also begun to cry, because I made so much noise against her shoulder and her neck.
Rx
FRIDAY NIGHT, after I fed the dog and walked along our road with him for a half an hour or so, I made myself a burger out of turkey meat. It was a new ingredient for me. Fanny thought we ought to eat healthier foods, so I was trying to get used to patties of ground bird and to yogurt that, even with fruit, tasted to me like something gone rotten. The dog and I shared three-quarters of a pound of partially fried meat. He showed more enthusiasm than I did. Then I washed the dishes and went upstairs to make a decision about the room.
Fanny had done the rest of the wallpaper. She hadn’t cleaned up, so charred strips and chunks, some still attached to the old gypsum board, lay in a track about ten inches from the two walls that she’d worked on with the putty knife and heat gun. The gun, which looked like a bulky, more dangerous hair dryer, lay on the floor, still plugged in. The putty knife was a foot away from it. She had worked steadily, I would have bet, probably crying through part if not all of the job. Then she’d have tossed her tools down and thrown a curse at me or something larger and walked out of the room to shower.
She could have told me, I thought, remembering the eyes that had lived on the wall. It occurred to me that this had been no kind of wallpaper for a child to grow up staring at. I tried to imagine how it would feel, in the weak glow of a night-light, to lie in a crib with the eyes on you over and over along the wall, ceiling to floor, looking at you through the slats and over the headboard again and again. I’d been required to qualify for a license to drive and I’d had to apply for a permit to keep my handgun, but no one had asked me a question about my abilities to be a father to a small girl. On the floor, in ragged, worried strips, was more evidence that I oughtn’t ever to have started.
She should have been sleeping, of course. She should have come home from work and walked through the house, maybe puttered awhile, and then she should have showered and slept, waking up in time to leave while I was sleeping. Instead, she had come into this room and finished what I’d begun. It was a kind of talk, I thought. It was the way we’d been talking for some years now. When she took down the paper, she was giving something to me, I knew. I wasn’t sure what it was. I thought it must have cost her a lot.
While she slept in our bedroom at the end of the hall, I sawed by hand instead of using the power saw, and instead of driving eight-penny nails by hand, I used inch-and-a-half Sheetrock screws that I sank with my battery-driven drill. She was in her deepest sleep now, and if her brain was going to let her sleep, my noise wouldn’t waken her. I framed up an alcove that came at right angles out of the wall between the closet door and the window corner. I eyeballed the studs but used a right-angle measure to be sure I had the footers level. Then I measured gypsum board, cutting it with a razor knife, and I screwed it, using the drill, into the studs that I had fastened at ceiling and floor as well as to headers and footers.
I had five gallons of joint compound there, and I taped so the seams were tight. I went on the toes of my stocking feet to the bathroom and made a thick soup of the compound by adding more water than you would for taping joins. I stirred the soup with my hand and the sponge, then did a heavy wash of the wallboard. Once I got the mixture and the pressure right, the stuff worked and the new right angle of wall looked like an old-fashioned plasterer had done it.
I would install a heavy-duty outlet with a built-in reset, and we’d go to barn sales and antique dealers and find a perfect writing table for her. This would be her office. She’d have privacy here. I thought maybe we could find one of those old brass lamps with a green glass shade and I could rewire it for her. I thought of buying her a cracked felt eyeshade as a joke.
The rest of the room would be for guests. Maybe someone would stay with us sometime. We’d have a convertible sofa bed and a chair and a reading lamp and pictures on the painted walls. Maybe I would sit and read while Fanny sat at her desk on a weekend morning when we both worked the same shift. It would be an ordinary room. Maybe we could put in a television set and I’d watch the football games. She might watch one with me. We’d just be a married couple who sat in a room.
Fanny was behind me. I heard her voice, still slow with sleep, say, “What’s this?”
“Where your office goes,�
�� I said, turning around. She’d slept in her uniform. She hadn’t showered. Her hair looked greasy and her skin was dull. There were bits of wallpaper stuck to her uniform pants and shirt. Her white shoes were laced, and I wondered if she’d slept in them.
“Not any office I’m working in,” she said. “Thank you, but this is really—well, Jack, how could you even think I’d work in here? And what’s that coffin for? That’s my office? So I can be dead in here, too?”
I couldn’t fasten to enough of what she said. I couldn’t answer. There wasn’t any answer. I felt like I had a sore throat, and I couldn’t swallow because it hurt too much. So when I talked, it sounded to me like I had a sandwich in my mouth and the words came around it. “A slight miscalculation,” I said. “I can take it down.”
She said, “Please.”
“I can take it down now,” I said.
“Fine.”
It was easy. I stuck the blade of my pry bar into the corner seam near the ceiling and I struck it, hard, with the palm of my left hand. The bar slid in through the thick, even paste of compound. I angled it toward a screw, and I pulled toward me with both hands. A lot of wallboard and a lot of compound and a snake of wet, heavy tape came away. I inserted the pry in the seam near the floor and pulled out and up. A lot of the board tore. I could have located the Sheetrock screws and put the drill in reverse and taken them out. But I didn’t want to take care. I wanted to break things. I pulled away more of the board, slopping the compound on my hands and onto the floor, spattering it up onto my face. When I had the outside stud at the corner partially exposed, I approached it and raised my leg. I could hear myself breathing hard. I didn’t look at Fanny. I kicked the stud and tore it away from the ceiling. It fell, still fastened to the floor. Some of the ceiling tore away. I kicked the other stud, and it went over, wallboard and all. I knocked each stud down. I laid the pry bar under the footers, two by four by thirty-six inches, and tore them up and out. The screws came up, tearing away subfloor, thin plywood on which I had planned to lay carpet.
Girls Page 8
