According to Raleigh’s digital watch, which daunted doubt, it was 8:32:37. School, thank God, had started. Yard, steps, jungle gym, all were deserted. There was no one in sight. Except for…except for the mammoth bulk squatted at the top of the tall three-bump slide. The bulk moved, and the tie sparkled on its yellow shirt. It had to be—and it was—Mingo Sheffield. Instead of heading from the coffee shop over to open Knox-Bury’s Clothing Store, as he must have unfailingly done for twenty years, Mingo had picked today of all days to come amuse himself at the elementary school for old time’s sake. The man was demented. He’d regressed entirely to an infancy he’d never successfully escaped. First Holly and Caroline’s swingset, then skinny-dipping, now the slide. Moreover, Mingo had obviously spotted the Fiesta at the stop sign, for he was wailing, “Raleigh!” at the top of his gargantuan lungs.
He was probably stuck up there between the ladder rails. Or he had chickened out—just as he’d always done in third grade, on that very same slide, panicking at the sight of the steep slope below, and so forcing the whole disgusted line behind him to back down the ladder or be trampled by his retreat. Hayes cursed: Sheffield had to be dealt with quickly if he was going to rob the library before it opened. Resisting the impulse to ram backward into his neighbor’s brand-new Chevrolet, he parked, stomped across the playground, kicking up dirt with quick angry steps as he went. He walked so fast he had reached the base of the tall slide before he noticed the immense long-nosed flat-handled gray pistol his fellow Civitan was pointing at him.
“All right,” called Hayes, furious. “Where’d you get that?” “It’s mine,” Mingo sniffled.
“No, it isn’t. I’ve got yours.” Raleigh pulled the tiny .22 from his
jacket pocket.
“That’s Vera’s.”
Hayes looked at the pistol in his hand, then at the larger one
gleaming dully down on him from twenty feet above. For God’s sake, he was living next door to a heavily armed loony bin. In silence, the two businessmen aimed at each other, then Raleigh slowly sighed. “Mingo, will you please stop this trying to shoot me? I’m really busy, I really am.”
“Oh, stop bragging about how busy you are.” Hayes’s fat friend’s face crumpled like an old pumpkin, as he began to cry. “Maybe other people aren’t as busy as you are, but you don’t have to be so mean about it.”
“Me, mean? You’re the one with the gun!” Raleigh dropped his own back in his pocket. “You’re the one trying to kill an innocent person.”
Tears dripped down on Mingo’s starched yellow shirt. “I don’t want to kill you at all. I just want to kill me, okay, if I ever could.”
“For Christ’s sake, Mingo! Over me and Vera? That wasn’t even true! I thought y’all worked that out last night.” Hadn’t they been splashing about, festive as seals, in the Starry Haven pool only eight hours ago? A spasm pinched Raleigh’s neck, which he’d been craning straight up. “Slide down, Mingo. Let’s talk this out. Is that gun loaded?”
Sheffield shook his head over and over. “I’m sc…ared,” he stuttered. “I came up here to think and then I got sc…ared and now I can’t get down and I don’t want to ssh…ssh…shoot myself…” The vast shoulders jiggled with grief. “…where all the k…kids will see me at recess.” Abruptly he let out a loud wail of sorrow and with both hands pressed the gun into his stomach as if he’d already been wounded there.
Terror froze Raleigh’s scalp and fingers so fast they tingled. Maybe Sheffield actually was insane enough to commit suicide. He looked to see if there were any children watching from the classroom windows, or a teacher who might call the police, but springleaved maple trees blocked the view. “Mingo. MINGO! Stop crying. Hold on, I’ll get you down. What’s the problem? Mingo? Don’t worry, listen.”
Sheffield kept shaking his head. “I’ve been up here thinking and thinking.”
“Really? Why don’t you tell me about it?” With a nonchalant sidestep, Raleigh edged toward the slide’s ladder.
“I can’t stop thinking about that movie on TV. On the Bub Bub Beach. I kept on hoping there was somebody alive in San Francisco but then Gregory Peck opened the door and it was a kuk, kuh, CocaCola bottle! And so, and so,” burbled the fat man, “what’s the use at all, at all?”
By now Raleigh was halfway up the ladder rungs and could see the back of Sheffield’s bobbing head. Memory rushed off with him to the sound of a whooping siren over the school loudspeakers and the sight of Mingo at thirteen, pudgy arms over his head, crouched beneath his desk during a civil defense air raid drill. In those days the Thermopylae schools had practiced for the Bomb seriously; students wore dogtags so their charred remains could be claimed by…whomever, and everyone donated canned goods to the school fallout shelter, which had progressed further than had apparently the one in the library basement. The Bomb, good Lord. Why was everybody talking about the Bomb again all of a sudden? He certainly never would have thought Mingo Sheffield capable of a philosophical suicide over an abstraction like nuclear holocaust! By now Raleigh had his hands on the top rail. “Is that what’s depressed you, On the Beach?” Hayes made a profound effort to sound sympathetic. “Here, why don’t you let me hold on to that gun for a second and I’ll help you get down.”
Slick as butter, Sheffield twisted his shoulders around, pointed the pistol in Raleigh’s face, and with a wide macabre grin, whispered, “I lost my job.”
Hayes had swung so far away from the mouth of the gun, he’d almost lost his grip on the rail. Now, he lunged forward with such desperate intensity, he shoved Mingo down the slide’s incline. The gray automatic flew away in the air. Mingo, his buttocks riding not on the seat, but creased in the sides of the guard bumpers, shot bouncing downward, legs flailing, and landed with a vibrant thud in the loose dirt below. He still sat there, his mouth and eyes circles of surprise, when Raleigh (after running to retrieve and pocket the gun) reached him, and said, “What do you mean, you lost your job? How could you lose your job already?”
Mingo didn’t move a muscle but his lips. “You tricked me. You know I’m scared of that slide.”
“You did fine. It was an accident. You mean Billy Knox fired you? What in the world for?”
“I went right down that slide, didn’t I? I never did that before!”
“Yes, fine, fine.”
“That’s the first time!”
“For God’s sake, will you forget the slide, Mingo! There’re more important things here. You tell me you’ve been intending to commit suicide and you tell me you’ve just been discharged! And I’ve got to go! What happened?”
Sheffield stretched his round legs out straight in front of him and sorrowfully stared at them. “They’re closing Knox-Bury’s because there’s no use in it. Nobody comes.”
“What?”
“I went in early to change my window and Billy said they’re moving to Colony Mall in Hillston this summer. And…”
“And? And?”
“And they don’t even want me to come even if I wanted to which I wouldn’t if they paid me. Billy said they already got somebody new with a manager degree, and all I got was two weeks’ notice. He said they were going for a new image and everything.” Sheffield picked up scoopfuls of dirt in both big fists. Hayes halfexpected him to start eating it as he’d often done under stress as a boy. But instead the fat man only watched while the soft earth sifted down through his fingers. “I guess they don’t want me,” he added.
Hayes took off his glasses to rub his eyes. “Well, gosh. Mingo. Gosh, I don’t know what to say.”
Mingo scooped up more dirt to watch it fall. “I had my wuh…window all figured out. I was going to show the whole family in some nice Easter outfits. They were going to be on their way to church. The mother and daughter were going to have on blue straw hats and the daddy and the little boy were going to have blue bow ties. I had a b…b…blue sky, and the church in the background, and I had two baskets of lilies. I had some good ideas.” The fist of dirt was drawing pe
rilously near the fat, quivering mouth. “What was wrong with that, Raleigh? You know?”
“Nothing.” On the pretext of clasping his neighbor’s hand, Raleigh shook the dirt out. Then with the authoritative deliberation that so rarely worked on his daughters anymore, he said, “Now, listen, Mingo, you’ve got to think of Vera. I want you to go back to work now. We’ll figure something out. A man of your experience is going to have no difficulty obtaining employment. I promise you.” After a serious pause, Hayes heaved Sheffield to his feet and dusted him off.
“You promise me,” Mingo echoed.
“Absolutely.” And silently fretting—where in Christ’s name was he supposed to find a job for Mingo Sheffield?—Hayes added, “Now, you aren’t going to try any more funny business, are you, because I’m going to call Vera if you don’t give me your word.”
Sheffield smiled with the relief of a punished five-year-old. “Okay,” he vowed. As Raleigh led him to the car, the insurance man kept up his rash assurances that among Mingo’s many friends (and the man was so gullible he immediately believed himself buttressed by a broad circle of supportive pals, whereas only yesterday he’d lamented the lack of a single real friend but Raleigh himself), that among these friends was a lead to an even better line of work than straightening stacks of sweaters in an empty store. Sheffield was actually smiling when he drove away. He was extraordinarily (in fact, annoyingly) quick to take heart. It was only 8:48:14. Unfortunately, there was still time to rob the library.
Soon thereafter the Fiesta was hidden behind a dumpster at the edge of the Jimson Furniture Store parking lot, and Raleigh W. Hayes had crawled down through high undergrowth into a gully, where hidden by blackberry brambles, kudzu vines, and, he suspected, sumac, and further obscured by a high dank wall of rotted leaves stacked by years of winds, the culvert opening revealed itself by a curved glint of concrete. After beating himself an entrance with a long stick, Hayes waited for the flock of bats and stampede of rats he was prepared to see rush from the dark hole. Nothing came. No red eyes glittered back at his flashlight. Nothing answered when he banged the stick or swirled it around the tunnel, gathering egg-clotted spiderwebs like cotton candy. The worst he could expect then was sudden death from the bite of a black widow spider. He stooped and crawled inside.
Tunnels themselves did not bother Hayes. He was not claustrophobic; why should one so capable of holding himself by the bonds of character in such circumscribed inertia that he had survived the last two days without ripping out his hair, why should such a man fear caves and tunnels? He hadn’t minded the closed tanks that had started some of his army companions hyperventilating. He wasn’t subject to the vertigo that had caused Mingo Sheffield to faint in the head of the Statue of Liberty with two hundred North Carolina sixth-grade Safety Patrols spiraling up the steps right behind him. Hayes’s phobias had nothing to do with space, which he had found generally reliable. Hayes feared the quick, erratic, and unreasonable. He feared madness, fire, death, rodents, and insects. For the last reason, he grew increasingly certain as he straddle-stepped, crooknecked, through the chilled, slimy, smelly, black cylinder, that a spider was at that moment loosening its grip on its spun thread and dropping into his hair. Continual ruffling of his hair with the sides of his flashlight did not calm him, and finally he tied knots in the corners of his pocket handkerchief and fit it on his head. Then, limbs stretched like a four-pointed starfish, he hurried on, knapsack flapping loosely on his back.
Doubtless his daily jogging had served him well, for no sooner had his thigh muscles seriously spasmed when the light bounced across the fork in the culvert described by his aunt. He hopped to the left, looked up, saw the metal lid, gripped his flashlight under his chin, and shoved up with both arms. To his surprise, the lid moved. He shoved again. The lid moved again. Bracing his shoulder beneath it, he looked like a medieval illustration of Atlas supporting a flat world.
Soon, under the blue-checked knotted cap the mud-smeared face of Raleigh Hayes was peeking around the door at the top of the basement steps. At the end of a double phalanx of tall card-catalogue cabinets stood the fortress of the library’s square mahogany circulation desk, where long ago he had been obliged to reach above his head to return books for his mother, and more recently been obliged to pay large fines to return books wantonly checked out by Aura, sometimes ten at a swoop. For the first time, there wasn’t a soul in the musty room, except all the made-up ones living inside the books. It occurred to Hayes that he had stopped reading books—at least stopped reading what his mother had called “real books.” He hadn’t noticed, but he must have stopped decades ago. Somewhere along the line he’d grown too busy, too old, too serious, for stories. He hadn’t had time for the people he actually knew, much less fictional ones. Only women and children had time for fiction. Oh, he still read magazines and newspapers and an occasional book of advice, to keep up with the times, to see where the world was headed in what until this week he would have called its “course.” But he realized now that over the years whenever he’d thought (not that he’d thought it often), “Didn’t there used to be more people in my life, more interesting people than, say, the Kettells or the Sheffields?” when there seemed to be somewhere in the back of his head a dim recollection of his having himself led a more interesting life; that perhaps what he was remembering was not his own life (and certainly not the “former lives” Vera Sheffield had claimed in her reincarnation phase), but, instead, the lives he’d met in books. It occurred to Hayes, with a peculiar ache of loss and even betrayal, that many of the wise friends he’d forgotten, and the women whose enchantment he could only vaguely recall, lived still shelved in this waiting room, and had long ago given themselves to others.
“For Pete’s sake,” Hayes muttered impatiently, “I’m starting to think like Aura.” And so, he marched without a look past shelves of those lost acquaintances and hurried over to the corner by the dictionary stand. There, inside a glass cabinet, mounted squirrels, raccoons, and chipmunks craned forward as if trying to look up a word. On top of the cabinet, the plaster porcine face of PeeWee Jimson, stub-nosed and lopsidedly jowled, grinned at him with insufferable smugness. The indignity to which the library benefactor (if imposing stuffed rodents on the reading public could be called beneficent) was now briskly subjected by Hayes did not wipe away this smug smile. Jimson’s plaster eyes, however, were popped open, and he was stark white as a ghost, as if, feeling the hands of the grandson of his dead, outmaneuvered boss, the hands of a Hayes, squeeze around his neck, he had dropped immediately dead himself from shock.
Lifting the statue, Raleigh received his own shock. A penciled note was taped to the back of the thick neck. It was not the artist’s signature; everybody knew that Mrs. PeeWee Jimson herself had sculpted the bust at home during a Ladies Art Club class more than thirty years ago. This note was much more recent. It said, “I’m proud of you. Love, Daddy.”
Hayes said, “You son of a bitch,” which was not an expression he was in the habit of using.
The bust could not be forced past its neck into Victoria’s big knapsack; it continued to stare in outraged indignation at its abductor’s back as it was whisked away, lowered into a hole, heaved against shoulder blades, and jostled through a black culvert. As for the thief, he felt, as he confessed, a pure fool, and was convinced that the light at the end of the tunnel would be shuttered by the blue legs of a Thermopylae policeman. But there was no one in the gully except a fat-chested robin, who disappointedly spat out a berry and flew away. There was no one in the parking lot either, as far as Hayes could see when he crawled to the ridge and peered around, with PeeWee Jimson’s broad white chin gouging into his shoulder. In order to make a run for his car, Hayes took off the blue-checked handkerchief to shove down over the statue’s glistening bald head.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the long lot, at the crack in the furniture store’s warehouse door, Pierce Jimson’s anteaterish profile slowly emerged. The adulterer wanted to be sure the coast w
as clear, as he always said to Lizzie, before he let her sneak out to her car (or rather Boyd Joyner’s car, for Lizzie owned nothing in her own name, not even—as her husband reminded her—her clothes). As Pierce Jimson’s universe had imploded to a single planet (Venus, patroness of illicit passion), his first impression of the distant movement that caught his eye was that two lovers were embracing down in the gully. Then, more specifically, and horribly, that a pale, plump woman, wearing a blue-checked scarf with an Aunt Jemima look, was rubbing herself all over the infamous Raleigh Hayes, who was proving himself a rogue of consummate vice, not to mention daring. Then, as Hayes raised up to scan the lot, Jimson, devastated, came to a more alarming conclusion: Hayes had a huge video camera strapped to his back. He had followed Jimson here this morning. He was hiding, waiting to film Lizzie as she left the warehouse. Or, worse, Hayes had somehow slipped inside, and had already filmed him and Lizzie on the box springs! Was that possible? No, it couldn’t be possible. They would have heard him. Would they? And Pierce turned the chalk color of his sculpted father—now lying heaving on Raleigh Hayes’s back.
Jimson shut the warehouse door. Lizzie would have to leave by the front door. He could tell his clerks that she’d come back again to ask for work, and wasn’t it a shame he couldn’t help her. Times were bad. And the infamous Hayes? He’d see that Hayes got his deed to the cabin, and the pond, before noon! But the fiend would have to understand that any further attempts—any further suggestion—of blackmail, and he’d find himself, pronto, in jail. A man could bear only so much. Of course, he, Pierce, couldn’t really go to the police, and so lose Lizzie. Lose Lizzie? He couldn’t breathe without her.
Handling Sin Page 11
