Alternities (29 page)

Or maybe there was a Donald Eash, too, a little older or younger, a little more like his gentle mother in the face or a little less like his father in profile. A Donald Eash who would not remember being best friends with a Rayne Wallace in the fifth and sixth grades.
Would not remember a Rayne Wallace at all because it’s me that’s not real here
.

Suddenly Wallace was afraid to confront the puzzle any more closely, so afraid that the poisonous contents of his stomach threatened a violent upheaval. He slowed the Magic to a crawl as the Hagerstown standpipe and the stiletto steeple of the First Baptist Church came into view ahead, prominent above the stark denuded trees enfolding tin-roofed clapboard houses.

The standpipe. Powerful memories snapped into focus. The night he and three other YDR members had climbed its endless steel ladder to leave their mark in red paint at the top. The way the wind had grabbed at them. The queasy feeling that the steel cylinder was swaying. Jimmy Fox dropping the brush over the side before their message was finished. A crazy stunt. A great coup—

It was not too late to turn back. He could backtrack to Millville and turn south, get on A-40 at New Lisbon and continue on toward Columbus with all thoughts of a nostalgic personal detour firmly banished from his mind. A Christmas present for himself, he had rationalized when the assignment came down. Walk memory lane for a few hours. No one would know.

As no one would know if he fled from an encounter with his own ephemeral reality. This Hagerstown was not his home. And he knew already that his absence here had left no void. Foolish to think it had,
It’s a Wonderful Life
notwithstanding—like expecting to see a hole in the lake after you’ve walked up onto the shore.

Another car roared by on the left, the driver shaking his fist at Wallace for blocking the road. Wallace jumped, and the start derailed his thoughts.

Name the disease
. Was that what he was afraid of, the fact of his own nonexistence? As if it meant that he was not real.

But he knew what reality was. He had nothing to fear from this place or the people for whom it truly was home. They could not touch him, could not change him. They would look at him with curiosity, wondering at the stranger—it was always a place that took note of strangers. But because they would not know him, because they would expect nothing from him, he could hide. He did not have to touch them. He did not have to fear them touching him.

Wallace’s foot landed lightly on the accelerator, and the Magic eased forward. He would not let himself be afraid.

The new woman’s name was Rachel.

Endicott had not asked her name. It was not important to him , as meaningless as any part of her past. She offered it herself, while he was freeing her from the chromed restraints—handcuffs and hobbles—in which she had been delivered.

“Undress,” he said.

“What’s your name?”

With sudden crackling violence, he slapped her, the stinging blow whipping her face to one side and leaving the red imprint of four fingers on her cheek. “Don’t talk.” He did not want to be questioned. The last one had always wanted to talk, alternately whining and cursing him, until he had been obliged to gag her to end the noise. He did not like doing that. There were sounds he liked to hear, and he had been harsher with her for denying that to him.

Rachel’s response to the slap was unexpected. The last one had gone to her knees in tears. The first one, the young one he had picked up himself on the road near Fairfax so long ago, had lunged for Endicott with clawing hands before he knocked her to the floor.

Hysteria and anger. He had been ready for either. But Rachel showed neither. Her eyes wide and wondering, she obediently began to unbutton her blouse. Obedience, but not surrender. “I haven’t really been arrested, have I,” she said as she pulled the tail of the garment from the waistband of her pleated slacks.

“No.” He should have slapped her again, enforcing the point. But she kept surprising him, breaking the patterns.

The blouse dropped to the floor. “And a man like you doesn’t need the money that anyone would pay to have me back.” she said, continuing to size up her situation aloud.

“No,” Endicott said “Now shut up.”

Naked, her true age showed—thirty, perhaps thirty-two. The extra softness in the hips and slightly rounded belly that the high-waisted slacks had disguised. The first hint of slackness in the muscles of her buttocks and upper arms. Her skin was pale white, with no hint it had ever been tanned—the sign of a woman too busy for vanity. Her breasts were beautiful, lush and round and riding a little low without the bra, the right globe slightly fuller than the left.

Endicott placed her on the platform bed on her back, wrists bound together to the headboard above her head, legs pulled back and tied to the top corners of the headboard so that she was doubled over and exposed. She offered no resistance, and yet her cooperation was measured, calculated, placating, humoring. She would learn.

“Why are you doing this?” Calm, no emotional content at all, like a counselor quizzing a patient.

He ran his fingers lightly along the inside of her calf. “Because there’s no reason not to.”

“You could be caught—arrested.”

A faint smile appeared on his Ups, and he shook his head ever so gently. “No.”

“How can you be so sure? They’ll be looking for me—”

He pinched the inside of her thigh, hard. She jerked, made a noise between a squeal and a grunt, and began to breathe faster. A pink flush blossomed on her thigh where he had pinched her, then as quickly vanished.

“Not here,” he said.

She was smart, perhaps too smart. That was something he should have warned Tackett about. Smart women were tricksters, calculating, manipulative, always seeking control, always avoiding conflict. Smart women thought they were better than men, thought they were better men. He had taught more than one the lesson that they were not.

“Are you going to hurt me?” she asked. A hint of a tremor this time.

He ran his fingers through the matted black hair between her legs, fluffing it. The scent of her floated up to his nostrils. “Yes.”

“What did I do? What am I that you need to do this?”

“The fact is, this isn’t about you at all,” he said. “You could have been anyone. Roulette wheel. Wheel of life. Bad luck, Rachel. That’s all it is.”

“You don’t have to hurt me. You can have what you want without hurting me.”

“But what I want,” he said, caressing a thigh, “is to hurt you.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s no reason not to.”

“That’s no answer—”

He brought his hand down hard on her most exposed softness, his calloused hand iron against her. She cried out and raised up off the bed, every muscle rigid, straining futilely to bring her knees together to deny him access.

“It’s all the answer you’ll get.”

The woman forced herself to relax., allowing the ropes to support her weight. But her breaths remained hot and shallow, her face pale. Fear-scent joined woman-scent in the air.

“Will you kill me?”

Sitting back on his heels, Endicott reached out and opened the lid of a compartment in the platform beside the bed. “That depends,” he said rummaging quietly among the contents of the hidden cache.

“If you’re going to kill me, don’t you think I at least deserve to know your name?” The words came in a rush, but behind them was that same measured withholding, that same calculating distance.

“No.” he said edging forward to where she could see the black-headed hat pin, its silver shaft nearly three inches long, that he held in his right hand “You shouldn’t be afraid of dying. You aren’t even alive.”

“I’m as alive as you,” she said angrily. “I’m as alive as you and I don’t want to die.”

With the point of the needle as stylus, he scratched intersecting Lines on the delicate skin of her breast. “What, no comforting faith in a life hereafter?” he asked his tone lightly sarcastic. “Through me you may find heaven.”

“I do believe in God and heaven.” Her voice was stronger, defiant “But I’m not finished living.”

“That’s up to me to decide,” he said pressing down lightly on the pin, creating a corneal indentation at the intersection of the scratches.

“Why are you doing this?” she wailed her anguish no longer measured.

“Let me tell you about God, Rachel.” he said his voice soft and soothing as a preacher’s. “They told me He punishes the wicked—He protects the faithful. Are you faithful. Rachel? Did you go to church on Sunday?”

“Please don’t do this—”

He brushed the hair back from her cheek, and she flinched at the touch. “The truth is it’s all a joke, all a hoax,” he whispered. “I defy your God. He’s just a wishful dream. I’m going to hurt you, Rachel. The worst things I can think to do. I’ll do to you. There are rules about how you treat women. I’m going to break them. And when I’m tired of you, I’m going to kill you. Don’t you think if your God existed he would stop me? Don’t you think he’d stop this?”

A sudden thrust, and the pin pierced deep. She screamed, and in that moment his soul stood naked and hurled the challenge heavenward:
You’re nothing! See what I do—I’m free and you’re helpless!
And he drew his next breath as easily as his last, untouched by the hand of any power greater than himself.

“This is the lesson,” he whispered to her as he withdrew the blood-slick pin. “I am everything there is. The only rules are my rules. The only reality is my reality.” She writhed, drawing gasping breaths, as he touched the point to her other breast. “So scream, Rachel. Your pain only matters when
I
feel it. Make me feel it, and for that moment you can be real, too.”

He drove the pin deep and felt the familiar surge of defiant self-affirmation. The one thing he could not understand is why, along with the exhultation, he always felt a perverse measure of disappointment at God’s silence.

There were no longer any tracks on the long wooden railroad trestle spanning the Whitewater River and the narrow flood plains on either bank. Wallace had once played chicken with slow-moving freights here, walked the railing like a tightrope, used it as a diving platform on sweltering summer afternoons.

Now the rails were gone, the trestle had been redecked as a footbridge linking the two halves of a small town park, and the old railroad right of way was marked as a footpath and bicycling trail. Signs at each end of the trestle sternly warned:

No fun
, Wallace thought. He kicked a bottle cap off the edge and watched it arc downward to splash in the chilly water, then walked back past the swing sets and picnic tables to where he had parked the car. The chains holding the swings creaked in the breeze.

There were any number of new homes on the outskirts of town, little clusters of pastel look-alikes lining new roads with names like Prospect Place and Cul de Sac Drive. But the heart of town looked very little changed from what Wallace remembered. He drove slowly, pulling to the curb now and then to indulge his curiosity.

Here a familiar old oak tree was missing, there a rambling, turreted turn-of-the-century “mansion” had become a lawyer’s office or funeral home. His grandmother’s old place on Chestnut had a new garage and an elaborate garden framing the porch. Bobby Prick’s house looked spookily the same, down to the toys littering the stoop and postage-stamp front yard. And when he rounded a corner to find a tangle of white paper streamers dangling from a pair of maple trees flanking a driveway. Wallace laughed until he was wet-eyed.

Feeling braver, he headed downtown. He found mercantile Hagerstown the same two blocks of red, white, and whitewashed brick storefronts, dressed up with new streetlamps and concrete sidewalk planters. Parking the Magic, he set out to explore it on foot.

There was a series of little jolts awaiting him. The bank building had expanded, and its parking lot had gobbled up the little appliance repair shop and postal substation which had stood next door. Dave and Dot’s, the fountain counter of which had been host to his “first date,” was now called Whitewater Gifts, and the old candy case was filled with ceramic cats and dried flowers. He looked for a copy of the weekly newspaper, but there was no dump box bearing its name.

The woman tending the register eyed him surreptitiously, had been since he had entered.
Strangers
. “Do you know where I can get a
Record
?” he asked her.

“There’s a music store in the Flatrock Center, over to New Castle.”

“The Hagerstown
Record
—the newspaper.”

Her brow farrowed “We get the Richmond paper around noon—”

Further conversation was dangerous. “I must have made a mistake,” be said excusing himself.

Continuing along the block, he looked for familiar faces. He found them sitting at the window table of Brooks Restaurant—older faces, deep-lined faces with deep-rooted names. Dell Schroeder, wearing his stained Pioneer Seeds cap, sipping a cup of coffee and sharing a story with stubble-faced John Wilson, whose yellowed teeth were clamped on the stem of a black-bowled pipe.

Frozen there on the sidewalk. Wallace was bombarded by memories. Schroeder and his antique steam tractor had always headed the Independence Day parade. Wilson’s oldest son and Wallace’s brother had been friends.

The glass separating Wallace from the two men saved him from blurting out a greeting. As it was, he stared long enough to draw their glances, Schroeder’s raised eyebrow, and a comment from Wilson that set them both laughing.

Wallace forced himself to turn away. It was becoming harder to stay here, harder to maintain his balance, even though he had dodged or postponed the most threatening encounters. He could not stay much longer. It was time to finish what he had come here for. He had to face his own life.

But every step closer to the corner was an effort, because around the corner would be the blue and white canvas awning that said WALLACE HARDWARE—FARM AND HOME, jutting out from the two-story brick building which had been a second home to Harry Wallace’s sons.