Nora put her hand on his shoulder, squeezing slightly. She waited until they were in the corridor before she said yes.
5
And that was the last of it for Jim.
He returned to work the following day, sitting behind the glass, selling tickets for the train. He tried to induce the headaches, but they seemed to be gone for good. His aspirin bottle stayed full, and he had a feeling of well-being that he almost despised. Occasionally, when he didn’t even realize he was doing it, he glanced at his hands, half expecting to see Mrs. Earnshaw’s in their place, her wedding ring on her slightly wrinkled finger.
A woman said, “Two, plus a child, for Penn Station.”
“One hundred fifty-two,” he said, typing the information into the computer.
She passed him the money, he counted it out. As he passed her three tickets, he said, “Boarding on the river side. Train’s delayed by ten minutes. Arrive Penn Station at 7:30.”
“I wanted to get there by seven.”
He looked at her. She was forty, trim, brown hair cut short in wisps.
“Sorry, ma’am. It won’t happen.”
“It has to happen.”
“You could try the airport.”
She shook her head.
“Damn it,” she muttered. She reached for the tickets, grabbing them. Her husband and little girl stood back, near the benches. She turned away, then faced him again. “Is this the same Deerwich where the train crashed once?”
Jim chuckled. “Everyone asks that. Yep, it is. Just to the north, when it crossed the bridge over the river.”
The woman frowned. “It’s dangerous to cross bridges. I hope there aren’t too many bridges between here and Manhattan. I never fly, and I don’t like to cross a bridge that’s already had a crash on it. Bad luck.”
She and her family went to wait for the train, but Jim sat there with his mouth open. She’d said it and it felt like a secret code. It’s dangerous to cross bridges. I don’t like to cross a bridge that’s already had a crash on it. Bad luck.
On his break at 9:30, he took a walk out along the tracks, trying to remember the night of the train crash when he’d first had the experience. He followed the track up to the bridge over the Sparrow River. He saw the place where it had been repaired; where the train had cut loose and gone off.
The investigation was ongoing. Maybe they’d never know what had malfunctioned about the train on the tracks.
He stood there, staring at the tracks, thinking about the woman complaining about the danger of travel, and remembering Nora’s words:
The first to cross the bridge.
And then he knew, even before he found the list of names in the newspaper from several weeks earlier.
It read like a joke list of names from books and movies, the names of the dead:
Juliet Capulet, Norman Bates, Paul Bunyan, Zazu Pitts, Ramon Navarro, Silas Marner, Gregor Roche.
The list of the dead included, he believed, everyone he met in that group in the hospital room.
Every single one.
In that list, too, was the name Catherine Earnshaw.
All just happened to be in the one car of the train where all were killed.
Another name, too, that he recognized: Nora Fitch.
He sat down in the library with the newspaper and wept. He drank too much that night and went wandering along the docks and backstreets, as if somehow the answer would reveal itself if he searched hard enough.
Finally, after two a.m., he ambled home.
As he lay down next to his sleeping wife, he wrapped his arms around her, wanting to feel safe from a world he no longer understood, all the mysteries and strange coincidences and dreams-that-seemed-real of another world he’d somehow been thrust into, whether through madness or design.
Alice’s skin was almost too hot to the touch. She seemed burning with fever. She moaned slightly in her dream.
She woke with a start, and said, “What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” he said, his breath a blast of whiskey. “I just needed to touch you.”
She rolled onto her back, staring up at the ceiling.
“You’re drunk.”
“Sure am,” Jim said, wanting to touch his wife so badly, wanting to wrap himself around her and be part of her so he wouldn’t feel so alone in his mind.
“Go to sleep,” she commanded. “In the morning you’ll be sober and we can talk about things.”
“What things?” he asked, ready to fall into the coma of drunken sleep.
“Things about us. Things we should talk about. Things we need to talk about,” Alice said. She sat up. Switched on the bedside lamp. He looked at her naked back, wishing it could be pressed against his chest and stomach.
“I love you,” he whispered hoarsely, unsure whether or not he had really said it aloud or had only wanted to say it.
“I’m not who you think I am,” Alice said, still not facing him. “Not anymore.”
“Yes, you are,” he said. “Of course you are. You’re my wife. You’re Alice.”
But he hadn’t said Alice, had he? As he lay there, the fear washing over him like a warm bath, he knew he had said “You’re Juliet,” because something within him knew it was Juliet, the Mrs. Earnshaw part of him knew, had known, and had been trying to tell him in her own way, had been trying to tell him that this was no longer the woman he loved but a woman who called herself Juliet Capulet and might not even be a woman at all or even a human being as far as he knew.
The Mrs. Earnshaw part of him let him know that this was the intruder in his bed.
He lay there, feeling his heartbeat accelerate as Alice slowly turned in the lamplight, a half-grin on her face. As her smile curled up and her eyes glimmered with a dark onyx that might have been shadow, might have been stone, she said, “We have to have a long talk, you and I, about what really is going on inside that mind of yours.”
“Juliet?” he asked.
She smiled. “I’m Alice. Alice. Remember? Your Alice.”
She sat there, watching him all night; and he stared back at her, too afraid to look away.
In the morning, she rose and went to shower.
Jim lay there, frozen, waiting for what was to come, remembering the woman on the table surrounded by doctors. He realized that in some respects he was still there in that room watching Mrs. Earnshaw—or whoever the body had been—being brought back to life, or some form of life, some kind of intelligence within the skin that had so recently been shed.
And how he had felt a presence in that room when he was four, a presence that was not entirely human, not entirely like a middle-aged woman whose heart had given out and who now was going to have another being within her.
When the water stopped, he heard Alice sing as she toweled off, and then she opened the bathroom door and something that was not entirely Alice moved like silver liquid toward him.
But even as he felt something warm and metallic inject itself into his throat, he had the sense that he was not Jim at all, but something that lived within the skin of a nice lady sitting on a moving train as it headed down the New England coast.
6
You mustn’t pass this on, because I know who you are on the inside, but you haven’t crossed the bridge fully, have you, dear? You’re still only halfway across, feeling the warm rain, the glimmer as it warms you, but it hasn’t burst within you yet.
Mustn’t make this worse than it is. It’s only a train after all, and travel by rail is so safe these days.
Look at that little town we’re coming to now.
Isn’t it lovely?
Across that river.
Across that bridge.
Get ready, dear. Our connection’s coming up shortly.
The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon
1
Sunland City was the last place in the world Jesus was ever going to come looking for Roy Shadiak.
He returned to his hometown in his fortieth year, after he felt he could
never again sell Jesus to the rabble.
Something within him had been eating him up for years. His love for life had long before dried up, and then so had his marriage and his bitter understanding of how God operated in the world. He’d gotten off the bus out at the flats, and brushed off the boredom of a long trip down infinite highways.
He stood awhile beside the canals and watched the gators as they lay still as death in the muddy shallows. He’d been wearing his white suit for the trip because it was what his mother liked him to wear, and because it was the only suit of his that still fit him. And it fit Sunland City, with its canals and palmettos and merciless sunshine.
It was a small town, the City was, and they would think him mad to arrive on the noon bus in anything other than creamy white. He would walk down Hispaniola Street and make a detour into The Flamingo for a double shot of vodka.
The boys in there, they'd see him, maybe recognize him, maybe some women might remember him, too, and call him the King.
He’d tell them all about how he was back for good.
He’d tell them that he didn’t care what the hell happened to Susie and the brats and that doctor she took up with. He’d tell them he was going to open a movie theater or manage the A & P or open a boat rental business. He’d tell them that anything you really needed, and all you could depend on in this life, you could find in your own backyard. Didn’t need God. Nobody needed God.
God was like the phone company: You paid your bill, and sometimes you got cut off anyway. Sometimes, if you changed your way of thinking, you just did without a phone. Sometimes you switched companies.
Oh, but he still needed God. Within his secret self, he had to admit it. Roy Shadiak still needed to know that he could save at least one soul in the world. His feet ached in his shoes.
He had only brought one suitcase.
He had just walked out on Susie. It was in his blood to walk. His father had walked, and his grandfather had walked. They probably got tired of Jesus and all the damn charity, too. Even Frankie had walked, as best he could. All leaving before they got left.
Roy had blisters on the bottoms of his feet, but still he walked.
He passed beneath the Lover’s Bridge, and the Bridge of Sighs, with its hanging vines and parrot cages. He walked along the muddy bank of the north canal, knowing that he could close his eyes and still find his way to Hispaniola Street. All the street names were like that: Spanish, or a mix of Indian and Slave, named like Ocala and Gitchie and Corona del Mar.
All the canals were thick with lilies, and snapping turtles lounged across the rock islets. The water was murky and stank, but beautiful pure white swans cut across the calm surface as if to belie the muck of this life.
Roy saw three men, old timers, with their fresh-rolled cigarillos and Panama hats, on a punt. He waved to them, but they didn’t notice him, for they were old and half blind.
After climbing the steep steps up to the street level again, he was surprised to observe the stillness of clay-baked Sunland City.
As a boy, it had always seemed like an Italian water town, not precisely a Venice and something less than a Naples, thrust into the Gulf Coast like a conqueror’s flag.
But now it seemed as ancient as any dying European citadel: It looked as if the conqueror, having pillaged and raped, had left a wake of buildings and archways and space.
It had been a lively seaport once. It was now a vacant conch.
The hurricane that had torn through it the previous year had not touched a building, but it had cleaned the streets of any evidence of life.
When he found The Flamingo, he kissed the first girl he set eyes on, a wench in the first degree with a beer in one hand with which to wipe off that same kiss.
A teenage boy in a letterman’s jacket sat two stools over. The boy turned and stared at him for a good long while before saying anything.
Then, suddenly, as if possessed, the boy shouted, “Holy shit, you’re King!”
“And you, my friend, are too young to be drinking.”
2
The boy stood up—he was tall and gangly, with a mop of curly blond hair, a face of dimming acne, and cheek of tan. He thrust his hand out. “Billy Wright. I swim, too.”
“Oh.”
“But you’re like a legend. The King. King Shadiak.”
“Am I?”
“You beat out every team to Daytona Beach. You beat out fucking Houston.”
“Did I? Well, it was a long time before you were born.”
“You ever see the display they got on you?” Billy pressed his palms flat against the air. “The glass cabinet in the front hall, near the locker room. Seven gold trophies. Seven! Pictures! Your goggles, too. Your fucking goggles, man.”
“If they do all that for you at your high school, you should really be something, shouldn’t you?”
Billy made a thumbs up sign. “Fucking A. You are something, man.”
“I’m nothing,” Roy said, downing his drink and slamming the glass on the bar for another. “No, make that: I’m fucking nothing, man.”
“What you been doin’ all this time, man?” Billy asked, apparently oblivious to anything short of his own cries of adoration.
“Selling Jesus.”
“Who’d you sell him to?”
Roy laughed. “You’re all right, boy. You are all right.”
“Thanks,” Billy said, then glanced at his watch. “I better get going. Curfew soon. Listen, you come by and see me if you got car trouble. I work at night at Jack Thompson’s. You know him? I can fix any problem with any car. I’m not the King of anything like you, but I may be the Prince of Mechanics.”
“Why would anyone care if his car got fixed around here?”
The boy laughed. “That’s a good one.”
* * *
When Roy arrived at his mother’s house a half hour later, he was three beers short of a dozen.
“The great King comes home. You had to get drunk before you saw me. And you couldn’t shave for me, could you?” Alice Shadiak said.
His mother wore khaki slacks and a white blouse. She had lost some weight over the past few years, and seemed whiter, as if the sun had bleached her bones right through her skin. A sun visor cap protected her face. She had seen him from the kitchen window, and had come to greet him on the porch.
“I suppose you need a place to stay.”
“I can stay downtown.”
“With your whores?”
“They all missed curfew, apparently.” He attempted a light note. “Must’ve heard I was on my way.”
His mother sighed as if a great weight had just been given her.
“Some man of God you turned out to be. I just wish you’d have called ahead. I’d have had Louise fix up your old room. Lloyd’s in Sherry’s old room. The house is a mess. Don’t act like such a foreigner, Roy, for God’s sakes. Give me a hug, would you?”
She moved forward.
In all his life, he could count the times she’d hugged him. But he knew he needed to change, somehow. He had not hit on precisely how. He would have to listen to his own instincts, then disobey them to find out how he might change.
He held his mother, smelled her saltwater hair.
When he let go, she said, “Susie called. She wants to know when you’re going to forgive her.”
“Never,” Roy said.
“What are you going to do?” Alice asked.
Roy Shadiak said, “Mama, I had a dream. It came to me one night. A voice said—”
His mother interrupted. “Was it Jesus?”
“It was just a voice. It said, ‘Set your place at the table.’ Something’s trying to come through me. I know it. I can feel it. Like a revelation.”
“It was just a dream,” Alice said, sounding troubled. “What could it mean? Oh, Roy, you’re vexing yourself over nothing.”
“This is my table. Sunland City. I have to set my place here,” Roy said. Then he began weeping. His mother held him, but not too close.
<
br /> “A man as big as you shouldn’t be crying.”
“It’s all I have left,” he said, drying his tears on the cuffs of his shirt. “You live your life and make a few mistakes, but you lose everything anyway. Everything I ever had, it all came from here. Everything I ever was.”
Alice Shadiak took a good hard look at her son and slapped him with the back of her hand. “You did it to yourself, what you are. Who you are. Don’t blame me or your father or anyone else. All this big world talk and wife-leaving and crying. Don’t think just because it’s been twenty two years that you can just walk back in here and pretend none of it ever happened.” She raised her fist, not at him but at the sky, the open sky that was colored the most glorious blue with cloud striations across its curved spine. “No God who takes my boys away from me is welcome in my house.”
“I told you, I don’t work for God anymore,” Roy said. He went past her, into the house. He found the guest bedroom cluttered, but pushed aside his mother’s sewing and the stacks of magazines on the bed.
He wrapped the quilt around his shoulders and fell asleep in his suit.
3
In the morning, he took a milk crate down to the town center. He set it down and stood up on it just as he would in other towns when he had preached the gospel. Folks passed by on their way to work, and barely noticed him. He spread his arms out as if measuring Sunland City and cried out, “I am King Shadiak and I have come here to atone for the murders of my brother Frankie and his friend, Kip Renner!”
A woman turned about as she stepped; a laborer in a broad straw hat glanced up from the curb where he sat with a coffee cup; an old Ford pickup slowed as its owner rolled down the window to listen.
As Roy Shadiak spoke, others gathered around him, the older crowd mostly, the crowd that knew him, the people who had been there when he’d drowned the two boys at the public swimming pool over on Hispaniola Street, down near the Esso station, by the railroad tracks.
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 45
