I said her name to myself, but not out loud.
Then I said it out loud, to hear it against those ceiling plates, maybe three feet over my head. I listened to its two syllables bounce back down.
A low voice whispered, off to my left and behind me, “Who’s that?”
I wheeled, and of course my ribs hurt badly. I made some kind of noise and then I said, when I saw her, “Mrs. Tanner. Damn. Excuse me. I was thinking about you, all of you.”
“Who’s Hannah?” she said. “You were saying her name.”
“No,” I said, “Janice.”
“You said Hannah.”
“I did?”
I saw a motion, and I went to where she sat, in the farthest left-hand folding chair in the church. Her orange-yellow face was gaunt. She wore a coarse gray blanket wrapped around her, over her coat.
“It’s so cold in here,” she said. “I don’t know why. We pay a fortune for fuel oil, but it doesn’t warm up.”
I said, “I was coming to see you. I was going to your house after this.”
“You didn’t know I was here?”
“No.”
“Then isn’t that a wonderful sign,” she said. “We’re in tune with each other.”
She shivered, and I went to one of the old-fashioned iron radiators at the wall and I touched it. Part was cold and part was warm. I followed the wall, feeling the radiators that were placed every ten or fifteen feet. When I got to the one at the back, where its water pipe entered the floor, I asked her, “Do you keep any tools here?”
“In the back, maybe. In an old hutch near the desk.”
I saw its shape, so I didn’t turn lights on. I found the wrench on a shelf, along with two hammers, a long screwdriver, a short one with a Phillips head, and a rasp. I tried to figure why they’d need a wood rasp in a church. The wrench was the right size. I thought the Reverend B. Tanner would have used it, but he forgot. He wasn’t thinking of radiators. Back in the church, I fought my way as quietly as I could to my knees, and I used the wrench on the valve. The air hissed out, and a little rusty water, and then I shut it off. The radiator jumped a little. It took me half an hour to do the others. It got more difficult, each time, to get down and then up. Once, I spilled a little too much water out. I pulled myself up on the last radiator I’d bled, and then I went over to her, still holding the wrench, and I leaned against the wall to her left.
“Aren’t you a miracle worker,” she said.
I said, “No. If I could do miracles, I’d have brought your daughter back. Mrs. Tanner, I haven’t found anything. I read the state police reports, I talked to deputies and troopers and some local police. I found two or three people to scrutinize, I guess you’d call it. I tried very hard to suspect them. I don’t think they’re involved. I don’t know a thing.”
“You warmed the church up,” she said. Then, her voice dropping even lower, harsher, she said, “Who are the ones you suspected?”
I shook my head.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “I don’t have too much more time to wait. Do you understand?”
I stared at her. It had been a pretty face, and I tried to find Janice in the tight, stained skin. She was waiting, and I finally said, “Yes.”
“Good,” she said. “Oh, didn’t you make the church warm.” And then she said, “So we all believe she was taken away. A distance away.”
“It’s often the case,” I said.
She moved her head. “Imagine,” she said, “it happens enough—little children are stolen into, I don’t know, are seized and taken—so you can say the word often about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Will we find her?”
I shrugged, then winced, because I had moved my shoulders and therefore my ribs too hard.
“What?” she said.
I said, “Nothing.”
“Will we ever find her, Jack?”
I almost said God knows. I almost said By accident, maybe. It was all about accidents, one and then another. I said, “Competent people are working on it.”
“Yes,” she said. I shifted my legs. She said, “And who is Hannah?”
The tin ceiling tiles were machine-pressed into sunburst shapes, but sunbursts made of straight lines and right angles. There was nothing round on the design that was repeated on tile after tile. Each of them was held in place with nails, I thought, and the nails were rusted. I figured they had hammered up into lath or cheap, unfinished firring strips. The radiators were chugging now, and there was plenty of heat. Mrs. Tanner kept the blanket around her, though, and I saw her mouth move slowly against the pain. And here I was, the burly fix-it guy from security, doing nothing for anyone but harm. Mr. Interrogator, I thought, who can’t find anyone to interrogate. I was nagged by something at the bottom of my thoughts, and I couldn’t find it. Probably some C-4 on a fuse that Fanny had planted for me.
Mrs. Tanner said, “Jack?”
I thought, You can give her that.
I thought, No, you can’t.
I reached into the blanket, and I found her broad, cold, weightless hand. I squeezed it.
“What did you do to your hand? You can at least tell me that.”
“Hooligans on campus,” I said. “They showed me what-for. My father always called it that when someone took a beating: They got what-for.”
“Are you in pain?”
I squatted in front of her, instructing my ribs to stay out of this. I said, “You’re asking anyone else about pain.”
“Don’t you talk like that to me, Jack. Don’t you make me into some hero. I’m a middle-aged woman with cancer and no more child. That’s no hero. God, maybe, is the hero. God makes the plan.”
I said, “Maybe Janice is a hero, too, though. Since nobody consulted her about the plan.”
Her face collapsed.
It seemed to me I had done more than enough damage. I squeezed her hand again, I made my body rise without too much drama, and I told her, “Mrs. Tanner, kids come back. Sometimes they run away and sometimes they come back. Sometimes they get stolen and they escape and come home. But sometimes, they, you know, don’t. I couldn’t be telling you anything new. You must have thought about this so much—”
Her eyes were on me. She simply nodded. I waited for her to talk about her horrible dreams of Janice, but she moved her head that one time and then she was still as she watched me.
“Your hope has to be in the authorities.”
She didn’t speak.
“And God,” I lied.
She said, “Hannah. Is she yours?”
“Was,” I said. “She was.”
“Oh, Jack,” she said.
“No,” I said, “it was years ago.”
On the car radio, one of those round, cheerful voices you hate if you aren’t feeling well said the long-range forecast was warmth. Temperatures would stay in the twenties, he said merrily, and I thought that if they did, the snow would melt off in two or three weeks. It was three and four and even five feet high in places on the banks of our road, and then it would be gone. We wouldn’t remember the cold or how we had to fight every day to get out and around. Though I wasn’t convinced. It seemed to me we were condemned to winter. I tried to see dirt, but I could only imagine snow.
I let the dog out and I took a couple of extra codeine jobs. Maybe I would get in touch with William Franklin, I thought, and ask him for something with a heavier punch. The brain waves must have been boiling that day, because as soon as I thought the word punch, the telephone rang, and Sergeant Bird, telling me what a considerable courtesy it was that he took the time to call, said they had followed up on my recollection of speed gloves and they had run a fighter who looked good for it, and they were holding him for me to check out. I had to hurry, he said, because if he was the one, and if he mattered to heavy people in Syracuse or Utica, a lawyer would be there taking him out on a leash in a couple of hours. I told him I was used to either military procedure, where basically I’d arrested who I�
�d pleased as long as he wasn’t an officer, or campus justice, where I was powerless with everyone no matter what they did.
Which, when I hung up, had me thinking of Rosalie Piri for some reason. I suppose it was the powerless part. Although that made me think of Fanny, too.
I called the dog in and gave him a rawhide stick to chew on. I noticed a great deal more white in his muzzle, and the slight thickening there that tells you how much older they are. What he did with his face, I would have described as smiling, if it didn’t make me feel too sentimental. He smelled of cold and snow. I nuzzled his face and he bumped me with his head while he worked on the rawhide.
I didn’t enjoy fitting my body into the seat of the Ford, nor did I like the backing-up part, where I strained to see. Letting it roll forward and steering small with my arms clamped to my sides made me feel better. So I did, shutting off the radio voice. I headed south, toward the state police barracks, squinting against a bright sun that seemed to be part of the argument—Mrs. Tanner would call it a plan—about winter ending. I screwed my face up against the sunlight, but I would not have given even money on spring.
Bird wasn’t there. A square, thick uniformed trooper with very curly dark hair and a frowning mouth who called me “Sir” but didn’t enjoy it took me to an office.
He said, “This guy was easy. He was the only overweight noncontender with his hair in a ponytail who limped.”
“How many gyms did you look in?”
“Syracuse cops walked into one, walked out, walked into the other, and there he was.”
“Was he ever any good?”
He reached for the cut-glass knob and stopped. He looked amused when he said, “You mean, were you good enough to hurt a pro?” He made sure I saw him take in the splints, the bruises, the cuts, the way I stood like a man held together with tape.
“Guy stuff,” I said.
“Yeah. Well, he wasn’t in anyone’s stable. He trained on his own and he fought on his own. He did the circuit—Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit. He lived that way for a couple of years. He still has his eyes. You’re a lot older than he is.”
“What was his name?”
“What it still is: Joe Corona.”
“Southwestern?”
“I think he’s from around here. Probably, he liked Mexican beer.”
“Where’s the one-way glass?” I asked him, pointing at the paneled wooden door.
“In the barracks in Wampsville and on TV,” he said. “Wait here.” He went into the office and shut the door behind him. Eventually, I heard furniture scrape.
As he opened the door again, he said to someone behind him, “Do not change your position. Don’t move.”
He left the door cracked open, and he whispered to me, “Check him out.”
I looked over his shoulder, where he crouched, and I saw the man I thought of as the Indian. His face was turned three-quarters toward me, and he held himself rigidly. This was a man who listened to instructions. His skin looked sweaty; his hair was out of the rubber band and hanging down his neck. He looked strong but out of shape. Well, so was I. All he looked was uncomfortable. I was the one with busted fingers and torn-up ribs.
I said, “Yes.”
“For certain,” he said, closing the door.
“Yes.”
“Now, you’re—”
“Yes,” I said. “Was he limping badly?”
“He said he sprained his knee.”
“I thought maybe I busted some ligaments for him.”
“You did him all right,” the trooper said.
“Good.”
“And he’s the one. Finally, officially, for once and for all.”
“Cross my heart,” I said.
“You’ll have to pick him out of a lineup with lawyers there.”
“And be surprised when I see him?”
“If you would, please, yes.”
“Isn’t justice wonderful?” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “did anyone mention justice? We’re just trying to lock the fucker up.”
So, I thought, driving home and thinking of codeine, we had found the malefactor. He had nothing to do with Janice Tanner, something to do with the people who sold the drugs to William Franklin, who sold the drugs to the students. That traffic would continue. If the Indian knew anything, he’d be out on bail to keep him quiet. If he was a hired banger, and they were insulated from him by a cutout they trusted who’d done the hiring, he would stand for assault, and he would serve some months, maybe in the county jail. And, meanwhile, Janice Tanner was gone. The students were stoned. Rosalie Piri stretched out in the cold blue light of a room in my imagination. And Fanny was as far from me as she could get. Haven’t you done well, I told myself.
If Fanny had been in the car with me, she’d have pointed to the faintest pink color in the tips of the dark trees. She would have found a willow tree on the side of the road and showed me that its branches were the slightest bit thicker at the ends. Because I was fastened immobile by the pain, I saw little of the sky. Mostly, I saw black empty boughs and white snow, and nothing convinced me of winter ending, not even the slight softening of the snow packed ten or twelve inches onto the surface of our road.
I drove past campus, and I drove to Rosalie Piri’s house, and I pulled up her drive to park the car in back. I couldn’t have stated a reason to anyone, much less to her, and I hoped very hard that she would be in the classroom or her office or at the market or buying new tires for her terrible car. I hoped so hard that she would be gone, I forced myself out of the front seat and over to her back door, and I made myself knock.
“You aren’t here,” I said.
Opening the door, she said, “Oh yes I am. Is your wife with you?”
I shook my head.
“Would you like to come in?”
I nodded.
“Can you speak?”
“I haven’t figured out what to say yet.”
She wore big men’s boxer shorts in a yellow plaid design and a flannel shirt of green and orange that clashed horribly with the shorts. The shirt looked big enough to belong to the big brother of whoever used to own the very big shorts, and its tails hung halfway down her thighs.
“I know,” she said, closing the door, “I’m a symphony of bad taste. This is what I wear when I do homework.”
“You’re taking courses?”
“Reading for class. If they have to do it, I have to do it. Would you like a beer? A glass of wine? Juice? Buttermilk?”
I shook my head. It was not only that I didn’t know what to say but that she made me smile so hard. My face felt stretched. She was smiling, too.
She put her hand out tentatively, and she touched the side of my coat.
“It’s the other side,” I said.
She helped me take my coat off and she hung it on a hook in a little closet and came back to stand before me. She reached up and began to unbutton my woolen shirt. She saw the wrapping. She made a sound and put her lips together hard. She insisted on touching the ribs, very lightly, and I winced.
“No,” I said as she flinched. “You didn’t hurt me. I expected hurt, so I acted like a baby. It doesn’t hurt.”
“It has to.” She had moved her hand, and the fingers lay gently on my chest, above the bandages. She moved them back and forth, lightly, watching my expression. I didn’t know what to do except close my eyes and put my left hand on her shoulder.
I moved my hand to where her shirt was opened several buttons, and I touched her throat. She made a sound. “Has to,” she said, flushing down her face and under my hand.
“Has to what?”
“I forget. No. I remember: hurt. You couldn’t hug or kiss anyone or lie down with them.”
“Could we stay like this awhile? Would you be willing to?”
“Willing?” she said. She moved closer and leaned in and kissed my chest. She kept her face against me and I felt her breath go over my skin as she said, “Yes, I guess I’d be
willing.”
I didn’t know what to do with my hand. I put it loosely around her throat in a choking motion, but we knew I wasn’t going to shut the fingers. They lay against her, and I could feel her swallow. Then she stepped back and took my hand in both of hers and kissed my palm.
“I felt that in my ribs,” I said.
“Your poor ribs,” she said. “Why did this happen to you?” She buttoned my shirt and then her own. Then she picked up my hand again, and she led me to the living room. I sat by kneeling my way onto the seat of the chair. She brought us coffee, and I almost slept, in spite of my confusion and excitement, while she made it. Then she asked me again, “What happened?”
“Payback,” I said. “I beat up a kid who runs the campus pharmaceuticals supply. They sent some people, not because of him, really, so much as because of the business. Free trade, kind of.”
“Couldn’t you have arrested him instead of beating him?”
I liked the way she accepted the option of the beating. But of course she was a policeman’s daughter. She would know.
“I hate those drug bastards. But what it was about was something else. You see the posters all over?”
“Those poor children.”
“One of them, the one whose picture went up first, I’m, I don’t know, I’m helping her parents.”
She nodded. “Of course you are,” she said.
“I felt that in my ribs,” I said. “You do that to me.”
“I want to,” she said. “But you’re helping her parents—”
“Janice Tanner’s parents. Her mother is supposed to’ve died from cancer, but she keeps waiting until Janice comes home. You really end up having to do it for her. Do something, anyway. I don’t think we’ll get her back. But, you know. Professor Strodemaster’s their neighbor. He got me into it, and I guess I got involved. I went after the kid. Jesus, I just jump around and get myself confused and end up suspecting anyone and then bagging it all and figuring no one did it, that she took off for New York or Saint Paul, Minnesota.… You know. I’m not doing much.”
Girls Page 18
