Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Smacking the tops of stacked dinette sets as he walked back through the warehouse, Pierce Jimson called, “Lizzie!” Only a whisper came hoarsely from his throat. His Voice! Was Raleigh Hayes going to rob him of his voice? It was intolerably unfair. Why couldn’t God afflict Raleigh Hayes with something awful like Love, and see how he liked it, to know what you were missing if you had to give it up.

  Chapter 8

  And Is Nearly Arrested THIEF! He was a common thief! Well, stealing public statuary could not really be called “common.” Not that removing Mrs. PeeWee Jimson’s rendition of her spouse from atop a cabinet of chipmunks was exactly in a league with scratching up the Pietà. Still, crime was crime, and now he was a criminal. He who had never stolen a thing in his life. No, Hayes instantly admitted, that wasn’t true. He had stolen on at least half a dozen previous occasions, each of which, when remembered, seared his mind like a brand. He had twice stolen change carelessly chucked about the house by his father. He had several times stolen (in the sense that he had eaten them while Aura dawdled among the aisles) a bag of smoked almonds from the supermarket. Worse, once he had stolen and hidden in the trashcan a jack-in-the-box belonging to his little brother Gates; first, because he couldn’t stand to listen to “Pop Goes the Weasel” anymore, and perhaps, too, horribly enough, because he knew how much Gates liked it. But childhood pranks and grocery munching were ordinary crimes, and everyone Hayes knew had committed them, far, far more often than he. Why, Jimmy Clay had stolen a car right out of the church parking lot and driven it to Myrtle Beach.

  So Raleigh Hayes conversed with himself as he drove toward home. His burning need to get rid of PeeWee’s bust was as physical and as miserable as a long-repressed urgency to, as he called it, use the facilities, when doing so was impossible because he was in a church pew or on a bus or in the tiny stuffed living room of an elderly lady client who wanted to know why he was opposed to making her cat her beneficiary instead of the daughter who didn’t even like her or the cat. Hayes couldn’t have felt more anxious if Jimson’s head, now on the floor of his Fiesta hatchback, had been not plaster, but as fleshy as the bloody head of John the Baptist, and he, Hayes, were as guilty of murder as Herod.

  Almost on the beltway, Raleigh abruptly decided that nothing could be more idiotic than trying to hide PeeWee’s bust at home, in a house where three women were always frantically searching wherever they liked for something to wear, where next door his neighbors were armed psychotics with no sense of privacy. Wheeling around, Hayes headed back toward the Crossways and his office. Since his secretary had deserted him, he could safely hide the head there.

  From behind, a sharp mechanical shriek scared him witless. In the rear window, he saw the waxy orange glob of Halloween candy that meant a patrol car. Thermopylae had only three. Naturally, one of them was following him. A momentary twitch of his toes on the accelerator was Raleigh’s only gesture of rebellion before he slowed to a stop beside an excavated lot behind a steel-mesh fence labeled Joyner Construction Co. Quickly he slid out of the car and hurried over to the sidewalk to keep the policeman (policeboy, rather, for the officer looked to be about the age of Holly’s friend Booger; in fact, he looked very much like Booger) away from his car. Suddenly, Raleigh felt two lead weights in his jacket pockets. His hands gripping the guns, he helplessly smiled. Great! Here he was with two concealed weapons, wads of hundred-dollar bills, and a stolen statue! Dear God, do something!

  Instantly, the policeman turned around to walk back to his car. Hayes, quicker than thought (indeed, entirely irrationally), hurled both Mingo’s automatic and Vera’s .22 over the fence into the red clay pit. His arms were casually crossed by the time the policeman managed to get the siren turned off, and looked back at him.

  “Good morning, what’s the problem, officer?” said Hayes, trying to sound cooperative, self-assured, and puzzled.

  “Can I see your license, please?”

  As Hayes reached to his back pocket, he followed the man’s glance from his best seersucker suit, now smeared with dirt and beaded with prickly burrs, down to his mud-caked shoes. One pants leg was ripped open at the knee. He was a filthy shambles. The lanky patrolman, gadgets hanging from his midriff in glossy precision, looked studiously back and forth from the neat, tight-lipped photo on Hayes’s driver’s license to the black-faced grubby man on the sidewalk. Raleigh combed his fingers through his hair. “I was assisting my elderly aunt to retrieve a, a trunk up out of her basement. It was, ha, sort of a pigsty. I was going home to change. But I’d left my office unlocked, important papers…” Hearing himself babbling, he wiped his hand over his mouth to shut it, then removed his glasses. The white skin around his eyes gave his face a thievish raccoon look.

  The officer handed back the license, which Raleigh also examined, sadly, as if heartbroken to see how respectable he had once appeared to the world. “Mr. Hayes, you made an illegal U-turn.”

  Mr. Hayes apologized.

  “I’m going to let you go with a warning.”

  Hayes thanked the pompous teenager through gritted teeth.

  “People get in a hurry, that’s when accidents happen,” added this insufferably sanctimonious youngster, whose wolverine face was horribly familiar.

  “Absolutely true, officer. Look,” said Hayes, “do you happen to know anybody named Booger?”

  The policeman went instantly from a deadpan to a grin, sparkling his thin long teeth. “Sure thing. He’s my kid brother. You go to the games?” He shot an invisible basketball into an invisible net.

  Hayes nodded. In fact, he hadn’t been to a basketball game in twenty years, although ages ago he himself had played left guard for Thermopylae High. “I think,” he added mournfully, “I think Booger’s a friend of my daughter Holly.”

  “Could be,” agreed Booger’s brother. “Yeah, he likes the girls and vice versa. He’s wild. You’d better watch her.”

  Well, at least Booger’s brother hadn’t said, “Yeah, I hear they’re getting married,” or “Yeah, I hear they have to get married.” Or…

  “Okay, take it easy, Mr. Hayes.” The law tapped the insurance agent on the shoulder, then sauntered back to the orange car, and waited there until Hayes drove at a crawl away.

  What if trespassing children found that (possibly loaded) pistol? Hayes circled the block but stopped at the intersection when he saw the patrol car still parked by the unfinished condominium. Why was that loafer sitting there, on taxpayers’ money? He backed into a filling station, where he used a pay phone to call Police Emergency. When they finally answered, he held his nose. “There’re two guns in a construction hole, corner of Broad and Elliot.”

  “Come again? Who is this?”

  Raleigh repeated his sentence slowly and hung up.

  The sadistic fates otherwise occupied for the moment in ruining somebody else’s life, our hero was able to slip the knapsack through the Forbes lobby and up the elevator and into his office unobserved. There he found Kaiser Bill emptying the trashcans into a big plastic bag on the side of his cart. With a nod, hugging Jimson to his chest, he walked past the Kaiser to his inner office. The bust would not fit into his file cabinet. When he returned to the anteroom, the big black man still held the trashcan raised at a tilt. He appraised its contents thoughtfully as he said, “Mister Hayes, it’s took care of.”

  “Yes, thanks.” Hayes glanced around the room. “Look, do you have an extra one of those trash bags I could borrow?”

  “Sure do.”

  Raleigh groaned as he leaned to take the folded bag; he must have twisted his back in that tunnel.

  “You okay, Mr. Hayes?”

  “Frankly, no. Has anybody been around here looking for me?”

  “Not yet.” The Kaiser was experiencing a feeling that he interpreted, as he did all things, as instructions from the Man Upstairs. He felt himself moving from an intrigued dread of this muddy, disheveled creature toward something akin to pity and protectiveness. God wanted Hayes watched over. The poor soul h
ad messed up badly—first killing his secretary and now fixing to stick what looked like a petrified white man with no arms and legs into a plastic trash bag. Having helped Hayes once, noblesse oblige compelled the Kaiser to keep on forever. “You hurt bad? Can Bill get you something?”

  “Pardon?” Raleigh was reaching in his wallet for the twenty dollars he remembered he owed Jenkins; promptness in paying his debts was a source of pride. “What do you mean?” His wallet was almost empty; all he had was a ten. He took out one of the envelopes; there was nothing but hundreds in it. He therefore turned to the bookshelf where he kept a twenty for emergencies inside The Home Companion to Medical Symptoms. “What do you mean, ‘hurt bad’?”

  “Beat up,” the Kaiser explained. “Bad,” he added.

  Hayes was offended. “I fell in a ditch,” he snapped.

  The custodian (who had now concluded that Hayes was robbing banks as well as killing people) stroked his white mustache, twice on one side, twice on the other. “You want to listen to Bill, you don’t want to mess with trouble this way.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Could you just finish up here, okay? Here, much obliged, okay?” Hayes pushed the money at Bill’s hand; it was, however, the withered one, and the bill fell to the floor. As Hayes, embarrassed, stooped to pick up the money, the smell of the mop in the pushcart reminded him that he had to find this Jubal Rogers. For the mop made him think of his grandmother’s porch, washed every Saturday by Flonnie Rogers, a small, bad-tempered black woman who’d lived at the house more than half a century. Slapping her wet mop side to side across the wide planks, she’d often threatened to cut off Raleigh’s head with an axe if he walked on her floor before it dried. Raleigh wondered now whether he should ask his aunt Victoria why his father had said he was not supposed to mention Jubal Rogers to her, and ask her whether she knew what kin Jubal was to Flonnie and why in the world his father should owe this man five thousand dollars.

  That there was some connection between blacks of the same surname, he did not doubt. Thermopylae was half black, and half of Thermopylae was too little, and too ingrown, and that particular half too circumscribed, to have room for strangers. Once, all the local blacks lived at the south end of Church Street in an area called so matter-of-factly “Darktown” when Raleigh was a boy, that not until he was ten did the meaning of that name penetrate; it was a word, like Thermopylae itself, untranslated and without connotation.

  Nobody called the area Darktown anymore, but many of the blacks still lived there. Flonnie’d had a sister who lived there. Maybe Jubal Rogers lived there too.

  Thinking of Flonnie, Hayes kept kneeling, until he was shocked by the weight of the custodian’s broad hand on his head. “You got troubles, Mr. Hayes?”

  Raleigh stood up fast with the money. “I told you, I fell in a ditch. What’s the matter with you? Here. Thank you.”

  “Nothing.” Jenkins accepted the twenty dollars, and looked politely at the portrait of Andrew Jackson, as Hayes walked out of the room, then immediately returned.

  “Bill, let me ask you something? Do you know anyone called Flonnie Rogers?”

  Bill spoke to President Jackson rather than Hayes. “Mean old lady, never got married? Used to live way back with some white family?”

  “Mine.”

  “That so? They was yours?”

  “She was employed by my grandparents.”

  “That so? She whipped me once.”

  “Me too.”

  “Uh hunh.” Jenkins rubbed President Jackson’s face with his big thumb. “She dead?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “’Spect so. My mama knew Flonnie Rogers at church and my mama died old. Passed away of an early evening, listening to the radio, just like this.” Jenkins tilted his head and rested his cheek in the palm of his hand. Then he gave a quiet sigh.

  “Well, ah, that sounds, ah, peaceful,” said Hayes uncomfortably. “I’m glad she didn’t suffer.”

  The Kaiser did not bother to correct this innocent opinion, except obliquely. “No suffering Up Above,” he said. “What you want about Flonnie Rogers?”

  “Actually it’s Jubal Rogers I want.”

  “Jubal! He’s gone from here. Long time. Could be he’s dead, too. Jubal got something to do with your troubles?” Jenkins moved behind Bonnie Ellen’s desk and settled himself into the chair, leaving Hayes, already disconcerted by the janitor’s presumption of a relationship that certainly had never existed between them before, with the awkward feeling that he was a visitor in his own office.

  “Bill, I just wonder if he was kin to Flonnie Rogers.”

  Meditatively lighting a pipe, the Kaiser told Hayes in a much too leisurely way that Jubal Rogers was, perhaps, Flonnie’s nephew, or near to. Was approximately Jenkins’s own age (somewhere near sixty-five), or near to. Had grown up in Darktown, played the clarinet, or some such, gotten drafted young and been sent to fight the Germans, or thereabouts. After the war, had moved up North to join a radio band, or something like. Had probably gotten himself killed over one of a large number of vices (women, liquor, dice games, and radical talk among them). If dead, he had assuredly gone Down Below, for he’d given nothing but sass and grief to the Man Above. “He were good-looking, he dressed good-looking and he act good-looking and he throwed his money around and his mouth too. The ladies they act like he was Christmas candy, and —”

  “All I need to know is his whereabouts,” Hayes said.

  Jenkins had no idea of his whereabouts.

  “Well, thank you. Excuse me.” On the pretense of needing to get something from Bonnie Ellen’s desk, Hayes forced Jenkins up out of the chair so he could open the drawer. In it he saw wrappers from Snickers bars, uncapped felt-tip pens, a Glamour magazine, and two letters addressed to him. These he took, and excusing himself again, confessed that he needed to get to work.

  “Don’t mix yourself up with Jubal Rogers’s kind. Things bad enough already.” And Jenkins astounded the insurance agent with another pat on the head as he left.

  Hayes stuffed PeeWee Jimson into a plastic bag, which he hid in the closet. Then he sat down with a moan at his tidy desk. “One step at a time,” he told himself sternly.

  His office was an austere and symmetrical place, a raft of sanity in a foaming sea. In the exact middle of each wall were two framed objects. South: his college diploma and his “Thermopylae Civitan of the Year” plaque. East: Aura’s oil painting of “Day Lilies in Red Clay Pitcher,” and her charcoal drawing, “Twins Asleep, Thank God.” North: the windows (out of which Mr. Forbes had jumped). West, facing any prospective purchasers of life insurance, a calendar and a print of “The Sinking of the Titanic”—as if to remind them that time flies, and life’s uncertain. Dead center on the brown rug, equidistant from two file cabinets and two chairs, sat the desk. At it sat Raleigh telephoning Betty Hemans, who, at sixty-three, suddenly had abandoned him to go home and write novels full-time; who had picked as her replacement Bonnie Ellen Dellwood! So much for her feel for character.

  “Hello. This is the residence of Betty Morrow Hemans. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you wouldn’t mind leaving your name and your number and around the time you called and your message and…”

  It was a recording. But why in the world should a retired widow…?

  “At the sound of the beep. I’ll call you right back. Be sure you wait for the beep. It’s loud, now.”

  It was very loud. Hayes rushed into words at a tumble. “Betty? This is Raleigh W. Hayes? That girl you got me, Bonnie Ellen? She’s departed for California without a day’s notice; I presume, permanently, and left a mess behind. My daddy’s not well, he’s disappeared, and can I prevail on you to do me a favor and come back to —” Beep! He must have run out of time. Hayes hung up and dialed again. The line was busy. He slammed down the receiver. It rang.

  “Raleigh. This is Betty. Bonnie went to California?”

  “I thought you weren’t there.”


  “That’s my machine.”

  “Why?”

  “My professor said a writer needs to keep her concentration going without disturbance,” Mrs. Hemans explained. “Peace and quiet is a pure necessity. I even had to give my gerbil Boots away. He made so much racket doing that exercise wheel.”

  Raleigh, offended that Mrs. Hemans had obviously stood right beside her phone listening to him make a fool of himself into her machine, refrained from asking how she could concentrate while eavesdropping on recorded messages. Instead, he removed his glasses to press his palm against his eye socket, and he threw himself on her mercy. “So, I’m just desperate,” he finally concluded. “I’ve got to go find Daddy. It’d only be a week or so, really, and maybe you could write a little here at the office like you used to.”

  Mrs. Hemans had a warm spot in her heart for Raleigh Whittier Hayes, who knew nothing about it. The shape of his ear and the sandy hair curling behind it were the flint that struck against her memories and produced this spark. She liked Raleigh for looking like his uncle Whittier, that dead poet warrior with whom, forty years ago, she had been so passionately in love, and whose sonnets she still kept in the false bottom of her jewelry box. Her novel, Remember Me, was, in fact, their own tragic story of romance and young death—though, of course, she’d changed all the details. She told Raleigh that if he’d come pick her up, she’d return to work until she could find a replacement.

  “Oh, Betty, I swear I’ll never forget this!” said Hayes. It was exactly what Whittier had said to her on a June night in the backseat of her father’s new Oldsmobile; in Chapter 32 of Remember Me, she’d transferred the line to a bombed church in a London blackout.

  For the next hour, Raleigh tried to leave his office, but his phone kept ringing. A fellow Civitan had decided to cancel his life insurance policy. “In my opinion you’re going to regret it,” predicted Hayes. “When your worries are over, your wife’s will be just beginning.”

  “Good,” the man said.