“What’s the matter with you? Come on out.” Absentmindedly returning the gun to his pocket, Hayes slammed back the grille with a loud clank. “Is there a problem?”
“No, sir!” Jenkins, chewing even faster, sidled behind his cart and bumped it out of the elevator, without ever taking his eyes from Hayes’s pocket. “Just you don’t give the old Kaiser one more thought, you hear? He’s gone. Here he goes. He’s gone.”
“Wait!” called Hayes. “Stop!”
“God Almighty!” Halfway down the hall, Jenkins froze, and spun the cart between himself and the insurance man.
Hayes threw his weight against the elevator door, which was shoving back at him in abrupt heaves. “Bill, listen, Bill, do me a favor? My office really needs a good cleaning. Can you take care of it for me?”
“Sure can.”
“Tell you what, I’ll give you twenty dollars extra. Really clean it out. That enough?”
“Sure is.”
“Listen, I’m sorry I kind of snapped at you. I’m in a big hurry.”
“Um hm.”
“Well, you have a good day, Bill.”
“Sure will.”
As soon as the elevator door rammed shut, Kaiser Bill abandoned his cart and sprinted to the supplies closet for a restorative sip of the cherry brandy he kept hidden behind stacks of toilet paper. He felt for the light cord. The bulb was a dim one, but bright enough for him to see Bonnie Ellen Dellwood wedged in the corner where her husband had just propped her.
Bill Jenkins’s arm, momentarily arrested, now continued on to the shelf, found his bottle, and unscrewed the cap. His eyes on Mrs. Dellwood, he contemplatively drank for a while, screwing and unscrewing the cap between each sip. Bill had been told (and told by four generations—by his parents, his wife, his children, and his grandchildren) that he was (as he was the first to admit to them all) not a big thinker. Intelligence he did not consider one of the higherranking human assets anyhow, having encountered in his long life so vast a crowd of smart stupid people. He preferred to rely entirely on the outside advice of the Man Upstairs, whom he consulted regularly and with perfect satisfaction. “Bill,” he now said, “the Lord’s going to pull you through this like a duck on ice. Don’t you fret your mind. You just listen to what He say.”
Sip by sip, the message came: Mr. Hayes had just shot his secretary. No one would want to believe this. They would prefer to believe that Kaiser Bill had shot her. That’s why she’d been put in his closet. Mr. Hayes expected Bill to, as he’d said, “take care of it.” For this he would pay twenty dollars, which was certainly cheap, considering; but on the other hand, better than going to the gas chamber at Bill’s age. That much was clear when the Kaiser rehid the bottle and locked the closet. Means and method came as he began to vacuum the Oriental rug in the dentist’s office down the hall.
Ten minutes later, with a thick carpet roll slung over his shoulder, Mr. Jenkins rode down the elevator, strolled out of the Forbes Building and into a dented, rusted, dilapidated station wagon that, twenty years earlier, had been the pride of a Starry Haven suburban wife and mother. She never would have dreamed, as she’d unloaded groceries and shubbery and children and bags and bags and boxes and boxes of newer and newer things to buy in a halcyon spring so long ago, that one day a Forbes janitor, his name and phone number painted on the side of her car, would ease into its rear door a stolen Oriental rug containing a presumably murdered secretary who hadn’t even finished elementary school when she’d sold the car.
During these maneuveurs, no one stopped or even stared at Kaiser Bill. The carpet trick worked as well for him as it had for Cleopatra when she’d slipped in, similarly rolled, to meet Caesar. The Kaiser had a naturally imperial imagination.
Following a further signal from the Man Upstairs, Jenkins gently lowered Mrs. Dellwood into the pit excavated by Joyner Construction Company for the condominium pool they had run out of money to complete. In fact, Bonnie Ellen’s husband had helped dig the hole. It was only after Boyd Joyner had laid Eddie Dellwood off that the dream of starting over in California had gripped the young man in such a terrible clasp.
Chapter 6
Of the Advice Given Raleigh by His Only Sane Aunt THERMOPYLAE, in the red clay Piedmont of North Carolina, east of the capital and south of Hillston, was a very small town. It was even smaller than it used to be. Twenty years ago, the Civitans, led by a youthful Nemours Kettell, had mailed letters all over the country inviting businesses to “Come Help Us Grow.” No one had even bothered to RSVP. Thermopylae had bad luck. Before her born-again days, Vera Sheffield had been a spiritualist and had lectured at the Take a Book to Lunch Club on “Thermopylae and the Amityville Horror: Are We Jinxed?” She reminded the club that Indians had massacred the area’s first white settlers, and scared off all followers until 1774, when the Indians were themselves decimated by a smallpox epidemic that had spread from the filched frock coat of a scalped minister. According to Mrs. Sheffield, the ghosts of these Indians had jinxed the town.
It was true that the town’s unlucky founder, Waverley Sheppard, Esq., a runaway Loyalist, was in 1774 hanged by a gang of marauding revolutionaries who called themselves the Independence Boys. (Among them was the grandson of Obed, that first Carolina Hayes, who’d risen from the indigo vats to partnership in a New Bern printer’s shop and whose son had run away into the wilderness that was then Thermopylae.) The boys had lynched Sheppard only two years after he’d named the town, on the run, as it were, from creditors in Williamsburg. He’d called it Thermopylae for the natural hot springs into which, galloping past, he’d been pitched by his horse and broken his leg. Those hot springs might have made Thermopylae’s fortune, but they were entirely ignored for the next century. The man who finally rediscovered and bought them was Goodrich Hale Hayes. He had no luck either. In 1860, he sank all he had into building on the spot a resort hotel for affluent invalids from the North. Scarcely was his paint dry when his springs were too, sucked entirely away as if by the ghosts of malevolent Indians thirsty for revenge.
A few years later, a large group of Northern visitors did arrive in town, and they did stay at the Hayes Hotel, but not as paying guests. When these Federal soldiers left, they stole everything they could carry off, from cut-glass doorknobs to a garnet locket containing strands of Mrs. Hayes’s hair, which one of Sherman’s sergeants took home to his fiancée in Rochester. They razed the garden, killed the livestock, and burned down the building. They also shot two teenaged Confederate stragglers who’d imprudently fired on them out the loft window of the smokehouse. On their way out of town, they set fire to every house on Main Street except Mrs. Agatha Kettell’s, where Sherman had lunched. Her neighbors cut her dead for the next two years.
Yes, Thermopylae was unlucky. After the War, while other towns were stuffing cured tobacco into little pouches and selling them to the Yankees, Thermopyleans rebuilt their charred homes and entered the crockery business. They used the mud that the old springs had left behind. It became clear over subsequent decades that Yankees would buy a great many more cigarettes than red clay pitchers. Carolina crockery had never entered the club of fortune where tobacco sat puffing in a rich leather chair. The century turned, and, a wallflower, Thermopylae was lost in the American shuffle, and sat out that long fast dance called Progress.
According to Vera Sheffield, the town’s only flurry of hope for Success had perished in 1929 when the Indian demons had shoved the great businessman Zebulon Forbes out the top window of his new skyscraper. (In fact, out the window of what was now Raleigh Hayes’s office.) Forbes’s building had soared on one side of the Crossways, and a new courthouse had risen to face it, business and government seeing eye to eye, and winking at each other, as they were all over the country in those rich Coolidge days. The Crossways had quickly become the heart of the town, a hub from which six streets spoked off, three on either side, like a spider with two missing legs. In the Roaring Twenties, Zeb Forbes’s commercial cathedral inspired Thermopylae with enth
usiasm. Nemours Kettell’s father slapped asphalt over Main Street (until then, brick) and over Church Street (until then, dirt), and Mr. Knox built a big department store with Mr. Bury on Bath Street, and on Sheppard Street a man from Delaware opened a hotel with a ballroom. Clayton Hayes, a grocer and butcher, branched out into furniture, at his wife’s urging, and hired PeeWee Jimson as his clerk. Everybody thought that the twenties would sow money like dragon’s teeth and that up and down those six streets, tall, rich buildings would grow overnight. Everybody thought this was just the beginning for Thermopylae. But, said Vera Sheffield to her small but attentive audience, “How wrong they were. They forgot the hex moaning up from the graves.” The market crashed, Mr. Forbes jumped (or rather was pushed by poltergeists), and that was that.
In the 1950s (when the Civitans found out that “Loyalist” meant someone opposed to American Independence, pulled down the statue of Waverley Sheppard, and changed Sheppard Street to Dulles Boulevard), there was even talk of changing the name of the town as well. There was nothing progressive or upbeat about an ancient Greek mountain pass, everyone of whose three hundred Spartan defenders had been annihilated by Asiatics. Maybe the name Thermopylae was itself a jinx. But the weight of tradition proved too heavy for the Civitans to throw off, and Thermopylae the town remained, and downtown remained only three blocks long and three blocks wide, and Time zoomed past on the Interstate, chasing Progress.
Raleigh’s eldest aunt, Victoria Anna, commenting on the unrelieved insignificance of her hometown, liked to say that she could crack an egg in the frying pan, walk from one end of Thermopylae to the other, and get back in time to serve it over easy. At seventy-two, Miss Hayes continued to take such brisk strolls, but in this custom she was now almost unique. To her disgust, people used their cars to get from one block to the next. The cause most often ascribed to the disuse and decay of “Downtown” was inadequate parking. Everyone had lost the habit of walking, and they could no more recover the instinct than their primordial ancestors could return to treeswinging. Everybody could buy cars, and so everybody drove cars everywhere they went. It did not, for example, occur to Raleigh Hayes this morning (determined as he was to prolong his life by strong doses of exercise) to walk the three-quarters of a mile between his office in the Forbes Building at the Crossways and his aunt’s house at the eastern end of Old Main.
He drove. He drove without thinking down blocks he’d seen too long to see anymore, seen first from his baby stroller, then from skates, then bikes, seen for years on the way to school and to the family furniture store (now Pierce Jimson’s) and to the library (now guarding PeeWee Jimson’s bust) and to pay restless calls with his mother on neighbors and relatives now dead. Furious at Bonnie Ellen Dellwood for running off to California, and at his father for running off to wherever in the world he was, Raleigh drove to the end of the street and parked in front of the white-framed, green-shuttered, three-storied Carpenter Gothic structure that he still thought of as Grandpa’s House. Raleigh’s father and all his aunts and uncles had grown up in those seventeen rooms. Years ago, they’d given the house as a surprise present to their only unmarried sibling, Victoria Anna, when World Missions Supplies had forced her into semiretirement. They had made her swear then not to sell the house and divide the profits, as she’d expected them to do. She’d sold the side yard anyhow. It was now a paved parking lot for a new Baptist church that looked like a brick motel and even had a neon sign on its roof. JESUS IS THE WAY, it said. Across the street was a new discount drugstore, and on the other corner was a new funeral home. The Hayes house had been raised by time into a commercial property. Raleigh expected to inherit it from his aunt.
Victoria Anna sat on the porch in one of the old green rockers. She poked a pencil impatiently through her tight iron-colored curls as she studied a folded newspaper held arm’s length away. She was, Raleigh knew, analyzing the stock market. He was always too timid to take her advice, and was usually sorry. Since his childhood, Raleigh and Victoria Anna had shared a special relationship, based on their baffled disapproval of and careful estrangement from the rest of the Hayes family. The two talked together daily, like colonialists at their club in Bombay, like doctors in a lunatic asylum, like Puritans at a Roman carnival, to reassure one another that they were separate from their surroundings, and that the world in which they found themselves was not the world as it was meant to be. Raleigh considered Victoria the only ambitious Hayes. Fifty years ago she had committed herself to a life that had narrowed to two quantitative and verifiable goals. The first was to set foot in more different towns and cities than any other Thermopylean, man or woman. In so doing, she was not traveling for enlightenment or pleasure or wealth. She was traveling to cover the ground. In her trunk, she kept a notebook of every site she’d ever visited; her list had more names in it than the Thermopylae phone book, and despite her company’s pleas that she resign, her list was still growing. “Which is,” she said to Raleigh, “the complete opposite of the case with Thermopylae, since there’s about nothing at all left here but a bunch of Hayeses playing softball on empty streets, and those left over sitting in the stands to cheer them on.”
Victoria’s other goal had become to possess the immense bronze plaque topped with a relief of Dürer’s Praying Hands that was awarded to any World Missions Supplies representative who reached a total of one million dollars in sales. Year by year, hymnal by communion cup by portable altar kit, trading with Adventist and Catholic alike, she had so far credited to her account $917,332. Her only fear of death was finally that it should come one commission too soon, rob her of her plaque and so nullify her life. On six previous occasions, she had already won a smaller plaque given annually to the top salesperson. Long ago, running the child Raleigh’s fingers over the name Victoria Anna Hayes indented there, she’d told him, “I fully expect that’s the only bronze the name of Hayes is set to. Besides a dented baby cup to start off with and a big slab of tombstone nobody can afford, to finish.” (On that occasion she had just flown home for her father’s funeral to find him already buried beneath, as she put it, “the Rock of Gibraltar,” which in the profligacy of their grief her siblings had charged at Living Monuments, Inc. in Charlotte.) “You remember, Raleigh,” she said, pressing his hand into the braille of her achievement, “they gave me the dinkiest assignments in the book, that no man up on the ladder would touch, and I came right out of the jungle with the orders in my purse. I have earned my way through the world to where I could have my name carved into something special. And do you think a single soul in this house has got the sense even to understand me? They wouldn’t leave Thermopylae if the sky fell in on it.”
Raleigh did understand Victoria Anna, and admired and envied her courage and ruthless stamina and determined self-esteem. He was also, still, a little afraid of her. “Aunt Victoria,” he called from the sidewalk now. “Where’s Daddy? Did you find out where he went?”
“Tell the world about it,” she replied, then waited, lips pinched, until her nephew climbed the wide wooden stoop and sat down in the rocker beside her. Finally she said, “I expect you want some coffee.”
“Actually, could I have some aspirin?” Yesterday’s headache was drilling into his temple again.
“Never touch them,” replied Victoria. “I’ve traveled far and wide for fifty years despite being told a woman couldn’t bear up, and never touched an aspirin, not even in Istanbul, Turkey, where they stole what they hadn’t managed to beg, including my samples case.” She set her rocker in rapid motion. “Earley called me at sixA.M. this morning.”
“Yes, Aura said—”
“Don’t ask me from where, but I could hear a jukebox.”
“Did he mention getting married?”
“Talked nonstop gibberish, which I hope you’ll have the decency to explain. How he’d sent you a message.”
“Well, Aunt Vicky, yesterday—”
“Asked me, didn’t I have Tiny Hackney’s trunk in the basement? Said, tell you he just remem
bered he gave his…” Victoria crossed her arms tightly, “…his trumpet to Roxanne Digges.”
“Oh, great!” Raleigh flung back and had to catch himself on his aunt’s armrest. Roxanne Digges, Earley’s third wife, the woman with whom he’d had the affair that had cost him his church, was the mother of Raleigh’s ne’er-do-well half-brother, Gates, and not someone Raleigh Hayes wished ever to have to see again; nor had he ever expected to, since she’d left Earley thirty years ago. “Did you happen to ask Daddy what in the world he thinks he’s up to?”
Miss Hayes rubbed both earlobes as if she’d just removed some uncomfortable jewelry. “Raleigh, I would not ask that man the simple time of day. I told him I had telephoned his doctor and his doctor said he could drop dead in a second and have nobody but himself to blame if he didn’t get back in that hospital bed.” She rocked more strenuously, and Raleigh found himself keeping pace.
“Aunt Vicky, did I tell you it looks like Daddy put his house on the market?”
“No. I found out on my own. You didn’t tell me much of anything.” She swatted his arm with the folded newspaper. “I don’t know why you didn’t bother getting back in touch with me last night, Raleigh, since you and I have always taken care of this Earley business together, unless you think I’m too old…”
“No, of course—”
“But Aura explained you had to go to bed early. I’m surprised you could sleep.”
Raleigh blushed. “I meant to call you, but this latest has just worn me out.”
“If I’d gone to bed early in the rain forests of Molucca, I’d like to know where I’d be now.”
“Aura said—”
“Aura said she was too sleepy to explain about this, what she called, ‘quest’ your nincompoop father’s sending you on. ‘I’m not a morning person,’ is what Aura said.”
And so Raleigh paraphrased, without the profanity, and, for now, omitting, as his father had requested, any mention of Jubal Rogers, the tape recording, and the note that yesterday had been thrust upon him like a ransom demand. Victoria took her bifocals from the pocket of her baggy gray cardigan sweater and carefully threaded the stems through her watch-spring curls. “Why New Orleans?” she inquired when he finished.
Handling Sin Page 9
