Why not? I might have done the same if Hannah had become a girl and an almost-adolescent and sneaked away to crawl around on top of some naked man with her hands and mouth working.
You’re thinking of Rosalie, I thought.
But of course I knew that. I had known it. That was what had tipped me off. The little girlness of it. That was what he had loved. That was what had frightened me about some of my pleasure with Rosalie. I wondered what had finally scared him.
Sergeant Bird had questioned and dismissed a man in Vestal, New York, who had been accused of molesting a child. He had sworn at me for pestering him, and then he had read me a summary of the state detective bureau’s file survey: zero suspects placed on the scene. We had congratulated each other on our fine police work. And I thought that if Mrs. Tanner was going to die and not see a live child, she could possibly see the person who had killed her, if I was right. I had not told Sergeant Bird about the guess I was arriving at. I had barely told myself.
The worst I could be was wrong, I thought.
Who cares that terribly much if I take out the ugly dark handgun and put a few rounds in him and then they say I’m wrong?
The dog came back with a bright yellow wrapper from a fast-food sandwich. His tail swung slowly back and forth to signal not hunting but the hunter’s return with his prey.
“You’re brilliant,” I told him.
He agreed.
“Drop it for me.”
He deposited the wrapper on the softening ice, but he kept an eye on it. When I picked it up, he watched as I put it into my coat. I shoved it in with the pistol. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t need to draw the piece with any speed or fire it with accuracy. I was simply going to brandish it, as they say. I was going to wave it in somebody’s face until I was satisfied. Or maybe I’d just kill someone.
I expected to find her in a coma, but she was sitting up in a rocking chair in her kitchen. I’m not what you’d call a man of taste. I like light. I like to feel warm from colors. I don’t like living the way someone in a cubicle decided I ought to. But I don’t know much more. Whatever I learned about the way the larger, man-made pieces of the world fit with one another, I learned from Fanny.
Still, when I was in the Tanners’ house again, I wondered why you wouldn’t just shoot yourself or hang yourself or drive yourself into a deep lake if you worked from your adolescence on to surround yourself with what I saw. There were crocheted armrests on the rockers in the kitchen, near the stove. They were made of the kind of tan, white, gold, and black wool you can buy for not very much in the little intentionally homespun general stores you find in small upstate towns. There were braided rugs you could buy from the smaller catalogs printed on coarser paper. Imitation-brass fire tools stood near their heavy iron woodstove in a fake wrought-iron stand. Their pottery mugs did not discuss Christ, salvation, or sin, but they did sport cheerful red-white-and-blue Pennsylvania Dutch designs.
Reverend Tanner was feeding her oatmeal. She was frowning at him and flapping her hands. When she saw me, a smile changed her face, and then—like Rosalie and then like me—she covered her face with her hands the way kids do.
“You see?” she said to her husband. “You see what you’ve done? Jack might as well have caught me in a high chair.”
The reverend said to me, “I thought she might eat if I did it this way.”
“It isn’t the dying,” she said. “It’s the terrible cooking.”
“I can fry French toast,” I said. “I can make stew. Corn chowder. Some kind of a roast. I’d be pleased to try. Vegetable soup? My wife taught me how to make soup.”
Her husband nodded encouragement to her. She closed her eyes and shook her head.
“And don’t talk that dying nonsense,” he said.
She didn’t bother to answer, and he didn’t bother to say any more. He put down the crockery bowl.
“How about a drink?” I said. “How about a shot of whiskey?”
“We don’t drink,” he said. “We never drank.”
She whispered, “Maybe we should have.”
I didn’t know if she heard him talking about his own death in hers. I noticed when he stood that his belly was soft and bulging a little. His thin-looking blue shirt and feed-store dark blue gabardine pants were hard-folded, as if he’d worn them for many weeks. There were stains on his shirt and the lap of his trousers. Before he carried the bowl and long-handled iced-tea spoon to the sink, he looked around, his eyes big behind his glasses, and I thought he was trying to find where he was, or where the sink was, or the table she sat at. The shape and drift of the stains on his clothes reminded me of Randy Strodemaster’s bathrobe. The reverend was getting ready to be alone. No. He wasn’t setting himself or preparing his mind. It just was coming. It was like a storm. He knew it was almost there.
Mrs. Tanner was wearing boot socks and pajama bottoms and a sweater under the blanket that was wrapped around her shoulders. It was a bright gold blanket, and I knew it would feel soft and almost damp, the way those machine-made fabrics felt. She seemed a lot stronger than yesterday, weaker than days before. Her almost-orange skin, with something darker underneath its soft top layer, looked tight.
And like someone trying to make sure she would haunt me later on, months later and years later on, she looked at me with her tired eyes with their brown-gray semicircles underneath and she said, “You look terrible, Jack. What hurts so much? What did you do to your fingers?”
“The fingers are fine,” I said, sitting across the table from her. The room was very hot, but I kept my coat on. I guess I was trying to join her in some of it. “There was what you would call a fracas. Law enforcement waded in and busted up their fingers.”
She shaped a little bit of what might have gone on to be a smile but didn’t.
“I hope you didn’t hurt any of the students.”
I shook my head. “I take care of them,” I said.
“Yes, of course you do. You must, apparently.”
“Must?”
“I’m being a soothsayer. It used to be my role. He would comfort them, and I would be an oracle of certainties. You need that kind of teamwork in the country-pastor profession. I hope you feel all right.”
“I hope you do.”
She put her wide hand, which was so light, out on the table. If there had been a newspaper, I thought, I could have read it through the back of her hand. The fingers were relaxed, almost curled. I took hold of it. I let my hand lie under hers. It weighed so little, my broken fingers felt almost nothing. I would have held her up if I could. I would have breathed for her.
Find her daughter, I told myself. That’s what she wants.
When I let my breath out, it sounded shaky even to me.
Her husband sat down. He put tea in shallow cups on saucers in front of each of us. He held the edge of the table.
He said with a hardness, “What.” It wasn’t really a question.
Mrs. Tanner said, “He knows something. Jack? You know something.”
I got the next breath in, and then I got it out.
“Maybe,” I said. “Possibly. I don’t know. Possibly. Can I ask you something?”
Nobody talked.
“Did she wear fancy underwear? Grown-up perfume? Did she read about love affairs in the supermarket newspapers? Did she watch about them on TV? Did her girlfriends talk about it? Sex? Love affairs? Sexy men—you know, movie stars, anchormen, sports people.”
“Oh,” the reverend said. He sat back. He lifted his teacup by the tiny handle and then he put it down. “Well, Jack! In my experience, all girls of that age—”
“Nobody ever talked about her acting like all girls before.” I added “Sir,” figuring it would make me seem more respectful and the questions less disrespectful. “You see what I mean? I never heard she was an average girl before.”
“Was,” Mrs. Tanner repeated.
“Damn,” I said. “Excuse me.”
“Damn,” she said. I don’t think she meant
to be funny or comforting.
“She’s the perfect all-around kid,” I said. “She plays the coronet, she serves the underprivileged, she teaches Sunday school, and she’s a friend to all her neighbors. That’s unusual. Well, nobody added anything about her being a normal fourteen-year-old girl.”
“No,” her mother said.
“I don’t think of her as normal,” her father said. “She’s better than normal.”
“Normal isn’t bad,” her mother said.
“No,” he answered. “Not at all.”
“No,” she said.
“It’s just she’s a little … well, better, I guess you’d have to say. I’d have to say, anyway.”
That routine performed, they sat and waited for me to talk. I thought of the dog in the car, the ride home, the dark house. I suppose I sighed. I leaned away from the feeling in my right side. I thought of what might be opening up in there.
“I’ll be by tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe I’m getting at something. I haven’t got there yet. But I’m working. I’ll come by tomorrow.” I tried to be smiling when I said to her, “You plan on being home?”
“Above ground,” she said.
Her husband said, “My God.”
She said, “And there isn’t anything to tell us tonight? There is, Jack. I feel it. I’m sure of it. Why? I mean—you know very well what I mean. Please tell us now?”
“Let me get there,” I said. “I have to get there.”
Her hand had stayed with mine. I’d felt it start beating, moving inside, when she thought I was going to tell her. I’d felt it slow after she knew I wouldn’t. Now she moved it so I’d let her go.
“You be here,” she said.
“You be here, too,” I told her. I was trying to think of a way to apologize for being so bad at all of this. It seemed to me I could start here, with Janice’s mother, and go on all night with anyone who cared to show up.
I backed us slowly out of their drive, and I went to Strodemaster’s. His house was lighted up. He was in his kitchen, moving slowly but regularly. When I opened his storm door and stuck my head in, I heard a loud hissing and I smelled onions and peppers. The cooking odors covered the stink of rottenness I’d expected. Over the sizzling of what was cooking in a smoky wide black skillet, I heard music. In his loosely tied flapping blue bathrobe with its pattern of toothpaste stains and food smears, he was moving in place at the stove. He seemed to be slicing a long sausage to the rhythm of the music. When I closed the door, I slammed it.
He jumped. He dropped a bright broad knife. When he saw me, he did a big motion with his shoulders to show me his relief. He held up a finger, then went to the radio on top of his refrigerator.
“Gene Harris,” he said, over noises of frying, which he didn’t turn down. “You know his stuff?”
“I don’t know much music,” I said.
“Piano,” he said. “Beautiful jazz piano. And he’s from Idaho. Who’d expect it? You know? From someone in Idaho?”
I didn’t care. I said, “Randy, can I talk to you?”
“Town-to-gown? Town-to-town? Or beer-to-beer?” His big eye-glasses were smeared. I saw he was wearing corduroy pants under the bathrobe, and a white T-shirt. Nothing looked like his food had missed it. The chalkboard had all kinds of fine wobbly lines on it. I thought it was a very complicated map. There were darker spots on it that looked slammed into place with the chalk. He finally turned the light off under the onions and peppers. He got us very expensive San Francisco beer from the refrigerator. He expected us townies to drink it from the bottle, so I sipped. I hadn’t tasted it before. It was wonderful, almost sour but not quite, and it got into my thirst. It was the first time any appetite of mine for anything except a short, thin woman felt satisfied.
He was watching me. “Pas mal, huh?”
“Excuse me?”
“French. Gown stuff. Forgive me. I meant, not too bad.”
“I don’t speak French,” I said.
“No problem,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and he pulled another bottle out of the fridge. He had an opener at the table. “These things don’t have the little cutesy screw-off tops. You want a beer, you can open the mothers the old-fashioned way.”
“It tastes wonderful,” I said. I unzipped my coat, and when it swung behind me, it clanked.
“You sound loaded for bear,” he said.
“That’s me,” I said.
“So how’re you feeling, Jack? You got kicked to shit, halfway. You feel a little better?”
“I feel a little better,” I said. “Except I just came here from the Tanners’. Man.”
“Terrible,” he said. “I’m over there a couple of times a day. Terrible.”
“I didn’t give them the news they wanted,” I said.
He sat forward, pushed his glasses up, probably smearing them a little more. The way he looked at me, I thought I understood why his students liked him. They probably didn’t buy half of his absent-minded professor act, or the local guy of good heart number. But when he listened to you, he really listened. Someone could do a lot worse than listen like that, I thought with what I would have called professional admiration. His big, strong face was set, and his bright eyes were wide and locked. His hands, I saw, were clasped at the edge of the table. He looked like a giant joke about a good boy in school.
“Then what kind of news, Jack?”
I shook my head. “Gas. Wind. Noises.”
He nodded. “I know what you mean,” he said.
“I think you came up with the wrong man, Randy. You should have looked for a real detective. Or advertised, I don’t know, in Soldier of Fortune or someplace. You know? A real damned cop. All I do, I wander around, I get into trouble, I make people sad, and I bring that woman nothing.”
He leaned in, shaking his head. His loud, hard voice got softer. “You’re the man,” he said. “I knew you. You were the guy I wanted from the beginning.” He leaned back. “Jack, think of it this way. They have all those professional cops. They’re already working on it. I wanted a man with brains who knows the community, who has a heart.”
“You’re a gent to say it.”
“Really,” he said.
“No lie?”
He said, “Come on, Jack. For chrissakes.”
I sipped some more beer. I knew it cost about seven dollars a six-pack in the market, when you could find it. I thought I might buy some one day if there was something to celebrate.
Name it, I thought.
“Well,” I said, “you got me, I’m afraid. I didn’t help Janice, and I didn’t help her parents, and I surely didn’t help you,”
He watched me again, all eyes and brain.
He said, “I’m a man whose family left early in the morning while I was at school. My wife and my son and my daughter. In the car I’m still paying off in installments. One of those big Buick station wagons nobody needs unless they have to run errands before the country club dance. You know the kind of shit I mean? I know about screwing up so they never forgive you. I’m saying never. They never will.”
I wanted him to tell me what he’d done. We can sit here, I thought, and drink designer beer and tell each other how much of other people we broke.
He said, “So I know about fucking up, I’m saying. You didn’t.”
I said, “Randy, I couldn’t have done less if you went from town to town and took a collection up and paid me to fuck it up.”
“You want another beer, guy?”
“I have to feed the dog.”
“Bring him in,” he said. “We’ll all three of us have some sausage and peppers and beer. Your dog drink beer?”
“Not this kind, that’s for sure.” I had to be in the car, driving home with windows open for me and the dog. I had to feel cool. My armpits and crotch felt clammy, and the ribs underneath the bandages were just broken in two and the parts bumping into each other, it felt like. I’d had enough. I’d done enough. And none of it was any use.
Strodemast
er said, “You feel all right, Jack? You’re pale as hell.”
“Gotta sleep, Randy.”
“Want to sleep here? I meant it about staying for dinner.”
“You take good care of your detectives,” I said. “Thank you. No. Gotta get home.”
“You want a ride? You look peaked. You look like about a yard of shit in a pickup, Jack.”
“Considering how I feel, that’s a compliment.”
He got up when I did, but he did it more smoothly. My right side felt like it moved in several sections. I leaned on the chair, then pushed myself off.
He told me, “You stay in touch, pal.”
I swore to him I would, so he let my shoulders go and I worked my way down off the porch. It was a long trip to the car. It was a long time getting my legs under the wheel and the rest of me straight up, more or less. I couldn’t tell you now whether I drove home or the dog did.
I don’t remember a lot of the dream. It had to do with pieces of girl. I knew in the dream they were all over the floor and I had to keep from stepping on them. I ran down the stairs; I almost jumped them, getting away from the crudely cut wet bits that made the noise of soaked washcloths hitting a floor when I couldn’t help stepping on them. They were the consistency of old, soft fruit. I was on my way down when the pain in my knees and then ribs woke me up. I was on the floor beside the bed in our bedroom, and I knew I was awake, because the dog thought we were playing a game. He had his face in mine and he was nipping gently to show me he understood the rules.
Girls Page 24
