Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Hayes was distracted and spoke more bluntly than was best for business. “Fine. It’s your funeral. So long.”

  Hayes was distracted because he’d opened one of the letters that Bonnie Ellen had forgotten to give him. Postmarked Midway, South Carolina, it was written in shaky pencil on a memo pad with two big eyeballs at the top. It was from Roxanne Digges, his father’s third wife, who’d left behind Earley and their child Gates for a longdistance trucker named Fred Zane. The letter was a month old.

  Dear Raleigh, I guess it looks funny me writing to you like this because underneath it was no secret we never had much use for each other.

  But have you seen Gates or heard from him at all? I know you kept up with him in prison and then about five years back he needed some money in Nevada, which I didn’t have, but maybe he got in touch with you?

  I’d as soon not pester Earley—no love lost there, what with Fred, and anyhow he lost track of Gates way back. The problem is and I’m not one to tell my troubles, but they don’t give me too long here. Because of cancer getting into my liver. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother you. But it’d mean something to me if I could get in touch with Gates, if he’s around. I guess it’s real funny, me asking you where my own son is, considering the past, etc. But I’d appreciate it a lot if you felt like you could drop me a line c/o address above. I hope everything’s fine with you and yours. P.S. Fred died five years ago on Sept. 5.

  Sinc., Roxanne As Raleigh left the office, something remorseless grabbed each end of his stomach and gave a hard twist; spastic colon, he thought, doubled over. It certainly didn’t occur to him that news of Roxanne Digges’s imminent death could cause him pain. Like everybody else, Hayes felt more than he knew, and was better and worse than he believed. Bent over, he noticed an envelope that had been shoved under his door. Inside was an official bill of sale for Knoll Pond, its cabin and lot, clipped to a lawyer’s card. Also attached was a peculiar note, presumably from Pierce Jimson.

  Take it and leave us alone. If you try something else or fail to keep your end of the bargain, I swear I’ll go to the police. That Hayes was snared in the deep toils of a nightmare, he could no longer doubt. He was dreaming, and that was why even people like Pierce Jimson talked nonsense; why the world, utterly off its axis, chased him down alleys like a bowling ball; why he could not get on with his real life. In his real life, it was three days ago. He was really asleep, dreaming a horrible dream about his father, who was really in the hospital having his heart checked. “Ha ha,” said Hayes as he turned into Starry Haven and saw the crowd. Since it was all a dream, it made perfect sense for him to be seeing, as plain as day, an angry mob of women all over his front lawn, women waving placards in the face of the same juvenile policeman who had almost arrested him this morning.

  Hayes had to park his car around the corner of the block, where, as in a dream, he thought he saw Mingo’s new Chevrolet. He had to park so far away from his own driveway because there were no empty spaces any nearer his house.

  Chapter 9

  The First Sally Takes a Strange Turn ACCORDING to their placards, these women were adamantly opposed to nuclear power, nuclear war, and to Congressman Charlie Lukes, Republican representative from Thermopylae’s district and a fervent defender of missiles and missile shields for defense. Lukes had never said he was specifically in favor of nuclear war, but he had often announced that he wasn’t afraid of it. Raleigh now remembered that this very evening he and Aura had been invited to attend a reception for Congressman Lukes that Nemours Kettell was hosting at the golf club. He had forgotten about it. Obviously, so had Aura, here dressed in one of her old RN uniforms, with black armbands, waving a poster, like a flag, inches from the blandly officious face of Booger’s brother. On the poster a deadly mushroom cloud puffed up out of the congressman’s head. Had these women gathered to practice marching across the golf course and storming the Club Room reception line? In which case, perhaps Raleigh’s duty as a Republican and a Civitan was to warn Nemours Kettell, particularly since he was now close enough to distinguish in the moil Mrs. Nemours Kettell, unfurling, with her daughter Mrs. Wayne Sparks, a long banner painted, “THERMOPYLAE MOTHERS FOR PEACE. NO MORE NUKES. NO MORE LUKES.”

  All the women were arguing with Booger Sr., who kept throwing both hands in the air, in exasperation, or surrender, as Aura was saying, “Don’t we still have the right to free assembly in this country, Mr. Blair, or correct me if I’m in Iraq by mistake.”

  “Yahooo!” Young Mrs. Sparks, wearing a Halloween skeleton suit, gave the Rebel Yell.

  “Ma’am,” the policeman tried, “I’m not even here about—”

  “And the right to protest, and the right to march—” “Well, I think you need a permit to march, but—”

  Raleigh elbowed his way nervously into the press of hostile females, and scrunched down behind someone busty wrapped head to foot in bloody bandages, who shook a sign, “THOU SHALT NOT KILL!” Hayes feared being seen by this officer Blair, who had either changed his mind and come to arrest him because of his U-turn, or to arrest him because Pierce Jimson had “gone to the police,” as threatened (but how could Pierce have already found out about Raleigh’s stealing his father’s statue out of the library?). Or Booger’s brother had come to arrest Aura (apparently a left-wing radical, as well as a belly dancer and God knows what else). Somebody’s sign smacked Raleigh on the back of the head; he lurched forward into the buttocks of the bandaged protestor. “Sorry,” he murmured. The woman squeezed around, saw him, and gasped, “Oh! You!” White gauze covered everything but the mouth and the scalloped-lashed violet eyes that indisputably belonged to Vera Sheffield. Beyond doubt, she would use any excuse to deck herself out in some outlandish costume.

  Vera’s eyes narrowed with accusations. She whispered, “What do you want? Do you want Aura to see you stumbling around drunk in those clothes?”

  Raleigh glanced at his ripped, mud-caked rag of a suit. “I fell in a ditch,” he whispered back. How dare someone wrapped in catsupspattered shredded sheets criticize his clothes! A fact suddenly registered. “Wait a minute, Vera! Your teeth. Your wires are gone!”

  “No thanks to you,” she muttered darkly.

  From the commotion’s hub, Aura’s voice rose brightly. “Well, officer, if you wanted the Sheffields’ house, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Naturally, we thought you came to arrest us.”

  “Naturally,” nodded Mrs. Kettell, disappointed.

  The hapless policeman tugged up his gun belt. “Listen, ladies…”

  Aura pushed through the placards. “Where are you, Vera? It’s your house he wants. Why, Raleigh, what happened to you?”

  “I fell in a ditch. Excuse us for just a second. Could I speak to you a moment, Aura?”

  Abruptly, as if they’d rehearsed, the crowd of women backstepped into a circle; some watched Vera hopping slowly with the patrolman across her driveway; some watched Raleigh Hayes, in filthy tatters, turn purple. With clamped teeth, he led his wife away from them to the front steps.

  “You know,” Aura mused, “the way you look, maybe you’d like to march with us.”

  “I’m not marching anywhere, and I hope you aren’t either.”

  Her smile was brazen.

  “Aura! Are you smoking?”

  From her lips a stream of smoke French-curled up into her nostrils. She nodded without much remorse.

  “Oh, Aura, I’m really pretty shocked, I’m sorry to say. I’ll tell you this, I feel betrayed. I was under the impression that we gave up cigarettes ten years ago!”

  “Every once in a while, I slip up. I hope you can forgive me.”

  “Did you know Caroline is smoking too, and possibly even Holly? They may even be smoking cigars?”

  “Raleigh, is that what you came home to talk to me about, smoking? Because, darling, as you see,” she pointed at the massed women behind them, “I’m in the middle of something right this minute.”

  Hayes nodded wildly. “Umhum. Umhum. I can s
ee you are. What’s going on?! I thought Mothers for Peace was a discussion group! Why are you dressed like that?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I might ask you the same.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “From what?”

  “From this.” Raleigh snapped his head at the “Peace NOW” sign.

  Adjusting her snowy nurse’s cap, Aura explained, “We’re against Congressman Lukes.”

  “That much I have deduced. Did you happen to realize that we were supposed to be attending a cocktail party in the man’s honor this very evening?”

  “Maybe you were.” Aura blew three consecutive smoke rings, each inside the one before, a feat that Hayes suspected required extensive practice.

  From across the yard, Barbara Kettell was yodeling. In her orange fringed poncho, she looked like a large teepee. “Aura, EXCUSE ME, AURA!, if we’re going to get there before he starts talking, don’t you think we better get going right away?”

  Raleigh grabbed his wife’s starched sleeve. “Where is ‘there’?”

  “The VFW post on Dulles.…I’M COMING, BARBARA! LOAD UP THE CARS! LET’S MOVE!”

  God, she sounded like a cowboy movie. Hayes brought his face very close to his wife’s, and stared first into one eye, then the other. He spoke with profound gravity. “This is possibly and probably the worst crisis of my life. All right? My father has disappeared with my entire future and is endeavoring to coerce me into a wild goose chase and illegal shenanigans. Some of which,” his voice fell to an ominous whisper, “I have already committed. My secretary has vanished. I am receiving strange mail, including a psychotic note from Pierce Jimson.…”

  Aura pulled her head back and gave her cigarette a long puff. “Pierce, psychotic, too?”

  “I come home, and here you are, staging a goddamn peace rally in our yard, right when I need you the most!”

  With a sigh, Aura stubbed out her cigarette on the step. “Raleigh, I’m ashamed of you. I see you’re upset, and I’m sorry. Maybe you ought to just go lie down. But, be honest, what’s more important in the long run, your ‘crisis,’ or world crisis?”

  “Mine,” Hayes defiantly snarled.

  “Do you know why I married you?”

  Hayes sat down on the steps. “I have no idea.”

  His wife scanned the sky, seeking the past there. “You cared about right and wrong, that’s why. About fairness and peace. Do you remember that person? You cared about stupidity, and if you ask me, there’s nothing you can possibly think of that’s stupider than nuclear war.”

  Hayes pulled himself back up by the doorknob. “Aura, did you and Mingo by any chance watch On the Beach together on the late show recently?”

  “Cynical humor isn’t the answer, Raleigh. Talk about feeling betrayed. When I met you, you were a Democrat! You cared about something besides money.”

  “I didn’t have any money to care about.”

  “That’s why you were a Democrat? I wish F.D.R. could hear you.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Hayes jerked open the door. “I’ll see you later.” He ripped off his jacket and flung it into the hall closet. “Unless, of course, the world’s destroyed by Charlie Lukes, which, frankly, would be an immense relief.”

  Aura laughed, despite her just professed animadversion to humor. “Oh, Raleigh, go take a long bath and lie down.”

  Upstairs, Raleigh threw himself with a bounce on his bed. He didn’t even scream when Mingo Sheffield proved to be hiding behind it. He simply closed his eyes, laced his fingers beneath his head, and shuffled his shoes off with his toes. Quietly, he remarked, “Get out of my dream, Mingo. I don’t need but one nightmare at a time.”

  “Have they gone?”

  Hayes didn’t answer.

  “Raleigh, you promised you’d help me. Have they gone?”

  Hayes leaned on an elbow and stared a long while over the top of his glasses at the fat man’s head floating wobbily above the blue horizon of the coverlet. Finally he said, “Yes.”

  More of Mingo heaved into view. “You saw the police leave?”

  “Ah. The police. No, I thought you were inquiring about the yardful of Mothers against Charlie Lukes. They’ve gone.” Hayes lay back down.

  “The police are after me, Raleigh! Don’t go to sleep!” Mingo lurched onto the bed, tilting Hayes into a slide that he could halt only by grabbing the mattress edge. “I saw them coming, so I sneaked in your back door, and Vera’s supposed to say as far as she knows I’m still at Knox-Bury.”

  Hayes snuggled his head into his pillow. His voice had the distant calm of a psychiatrist talking through a megaphone to a mad killer on a rooftop. “And why aren’t you at Knox-Bury’s? I thought you were given two weeks’ notice.”

  “I guess…I guess…” Mingo began pulling at the tufted threads that patterned the coverlet. “I guess I went a little bit to pieces when I got back to the store, thinking about how Billy just didn’t even want me anymore. I guess I wanted to show them what it feels like.”

  Hayes opened one eye. “Excuse me, Mingo, would you mind not pulling the threads out of my covers? Thank you.”

  Sheffield grabbed one fat fist with the other, and shoved both between his thighs. “I guess I yanked a lot of Better Menswear off the racks and threw it in a pile.”

  “Um hum.”

  “I guess maybe my Easter paint got poured all over it.” Mingo flipped himself supine beside his neighbor. “Nobody saw me.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “But I think maybe they suspect me, you know? Raleigh, are you listening?” Rolling onto his side, Sheffield poked at his friend’s arm. “My mama would die if I had to end up in prison.”

  Hands behind his head, Hayes studied the spackled ceiling. “Your mama did die, Mingo, several years ago. So don’t worry about that.”

  Hurt shuddered through the mammoth body. “Raleigh, why do you always have to be so mean?”

  Before Hayes could carry out his impulse to laugh maniacally, “You don’t know what mean is,” then to clamp a pillow over Sheffield’s face and sit on it for an hour—the phone beside the bed rang. Through the wire’s crackle, Hayes heard the high-pitched, slow-paced merry slur of an unmistakable voice. “Hello, Little Fellow, it’s Daddy. Whatcha up to?”

  Ravishing irony, peaceful as Christ, descended upon Raleigh and allowed him to escape a massive coronary. “Oh, hi, Daddy. Nothing much. I’m just lying here on my bed with my neighbor Mingo Sheffield, shooting the breeze about the police being after him either for vandalizing Knox-Bury’s Clothing Store, or for constantly attempting to commit suicide. Excuse me a second.” To Sheffield, flailing with arched back in protest, Hayes whispered, ‘Oh, don’t worry. My father won’t tell on you. He doesn’t care a thing about law and order…So, where are you, Daddy? You certainly have kept us guessing, ha, ha! ’Bout ready to come on home?”

  His father chuckled. “You get my message?”

  “Yes, several, um hum.” Raleigh amazed himself. His limbs were not rigid; his veins were not bulging; his heart had not cracked his sternum in two. “Oh, yes, got your messages. Everything’s moving right along. PeeWee’s bust, Pierce’s cabin, Tiny’s trunk. Goddammit, where are you, Daddy?”

  “Raleigh, listen. I was talking to an old friend, and I hear Roxanne’s not feeling too well.”

  “I know. She wrote me.”

  “She did? Humm.…Anyhow, she’s gone to the hospital outside

  Midway.” Is that where Earley was? Briefly, Hayes wondered if he could get Mingo to run back home and ask the operator to trace this call. A glance at his neighbor (crawling across the rug to peek his head over the windowsill) convinced him of the futility of bothering to ask.

  “Son, maybe it’d be a good idea to try to get Gates up there to see her.” “Up there.” Ah, so the man was somewhere south of the middle of South Carolina. That certainly narrowed things down. “Raleigh? Have you found Gates?”

  The first vein popped. “Strangely enough, I
haven’t, Daddy. I realize he’s only been missing for five years and I have had a whole day to work on the problem in my spare time from robbing the library.”

  Guffaws. “Oh, I remember when you were little, I’d say to Sarah, ‘Go on, let the little fellow talk back. Sarcasm’s like Pepto-Bismol on his system.’ So, did I hear you say you got that fuck Pierce to sell you the cabin?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t recall that I was in the habit of ‘talking back’ to my mother.”

  More, more laughter. “And supercilious! That was always your other trick. Oh, I love you, Specs!”

  Standing now, Hayes wrung the receiver’s neck. “Listen to me! Where are you? Daddy, do you realize that your doctor says you are seriously jeopardizing your health by leaving the hospital?”

  “Try to get hold of Jubal, if you can. I’ve got a surprise for him. And if you can find Gates, just take him to Midway. Take him to her first, not me.”

  Calm cracked like ice in a frost heave. “How should I know where Gates is! When his own parents don’t! He hasn’t even kept in touch with his own mother!”

  “Ask Lovie. She’s the one he cares about. And just keep on doing your best, son. I’m proud of you. Ooops. Okay. I’ve got to go now. I’ll be in touch. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Don’t you dare hang up!” Hayes was hyperventilating. “Did you marry a…black teenage…mental patient you…abducted from…the hospital?”

  Laughter poured into Raleigh’s ear like boiling oil. “Specs, you’re such a worrywart.” A click was followed by the long howl of the dial tone.

  “Your daddy married a black teenage mental patient?” asked Mingo, on his knees by the window.

  Raleigh stared at the telephone receiver as if its purpose escaped him. “Of course not. That’s just an old family joke.” Hayes tried to call the operator quickly, but didn’t get her for some time. Then she either would not, or didn’t know how to, trace the call. On the other hand, she was able to tell him that Earley Hayes’s phone service on First Street had been disconnected; so his father wasn’t charging these calls to his home phone. Where was he?!